Cases involving the variant are increasing 70 percent a week in Denmark, despite a strict lockdown, according to Denmark’s State Serum Institute, a government agency that tracks diseases and advises health policy.
“We’re losing some of the tools that we have to control the epidemic,” said Tyra Grove Krause, scientific director of the institute, which this past week began sequencing every positive coronavirus test to check for mutations. By contrast, the United States is sequencing 0.3 percent of cases, ranking it 43rd in the world and leaving it largely blind to the variant’s spread.
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Danish public health officials say that if it weren’t for their extensive monitoring, they would be feeling a false sense of confidence right now. Overall, new daily confirmed cases of the coronavirus in Denmark have been dropping for a month.
I was under the impression we had top men (who? Top. Men.) in charge of genomic surveillance, but it appears not. Anyways, the good news is that new daily confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the United States have been dropping and and we have no hard data indicating that there is an avalanche of superCOVID cases about to overwhelm us, so let’s all take a deep breath and let our guard down.
I’m only a few degrees of Kevin Bacon away from people doing covid genomic surveillance in the US. Maybe it’s not coordinated as much as it should be or happening on the scale it should be, but it’s happening.
She was still feeling the way she always feels for 12-16 hours after working five days straight in an N95 24 hours after she got out of work, they have a quicktest machine at work, and she didn’t want to be consumed with hypochondria for the entire weekend. Plus it was on the way home.
She’d obviously been exposed at work but not more than has happened thousands of times already this year.
