CDC tested 5 Idaho COVID samples for mutated virus, but they were ‘insufficient quality’
Idaho will have to wait a little longer to find out whether more infectious versions of the coronavirus are circulating here, but health officials say residents should assume that they are and continue to follow public health guidelines to prevent catching and transmitting the virus that causes COVID-19.
The Idaho Bureau of Laboratories has been working with labs to identify COVID-19 test samples that could contain mutations associated with the more infectious variants. A national surveillance program allows state labs to send samples weekly to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which can then “sequence” them to check for markers of variants — particularly the B.1.1.7 variant first detected in the United Kingdom and the B.1.351 variant detected in South Africa.
Idaho doesn’t have a lab capable of sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Sequencing can help to determine the origin and spread of the coronavirus, and to monitor the virus for mutations.
Despite its drastically large numbers of cases, the U.S. has until now lacked a unified surveillance strategy to spot troublesome mutations in the virus. Only 26 samples out of Idaho’s 134,443 lab-confirmed positive COVID-19 tests have been sequenced and submitted to a global database in the past year, according to data as of Feb. 8.
Christopher Ball, bureau chief and lab director of the Idaho Bureau of Laboratories, reported that all five of Idaho’s first set of samples sent in for genome sequencing “were of insufficient quality” to be fully sequenced, according to spokesperson Niki Forbing-Orr.
One sample was partly readable and was not the UK variant, Forbing-Orr said in an email Thursday.
“So, still no evidence of the variants in Idaho, but we should all behave as if they are,” she said.
Those variants had been found in all but one of Idaho’s neighboring states as of Monday, including in a Wyoming county that neighbors Idaho. The CDC published a report last month that detailed how the “more highly transmissible” variant could spread quickly in the U.S.
“The modeled trajectory of this variant in the U.S. exhibits rapid growth in early 2021, becoming the predominant variant in March,” the report said.
It isn’t abnormal for a virus to mutate over time. Every time the virus replicates, it can change in subtle ways. When it changes in small ways, it creates a “variant.” The COVID-19 virus has a proofreading mechanism built in that makes it less susceptible to mutations than, for example, the influenza virus. But with rapid transmission, there have been more opportunities for the coronavirus to mutate.
Those mutations can make a virus more or less harmful, or more or less infectious. Scientists are concerned about the variants from the UK and South Africa, because they’re believed to be considerably more infectious and may cause more severe disease. Scientists also are concerned about variants — especially the one detected in South Africa — being able to evade the COVID-19 vaccine.
This story was originally published February 8, 2021 at 1:07 PM.
