Now to growing concerns
about the deadly coronavirus officially hitting the U.S.
One person with coronavirus
in King County, Washington State has died.
So it's been two years since the first case
of Covid was detected in the U.S.
And we've had a major scientific breakthrough since then,
vaccines, antivirals, probably what's most significant
in the background is genomic sequencing.
That's the work that's been done by scientific labs
to figure out what mutations people have of coronavirus
and what those mutations do when they do infect a person.
It's really to help adapt vaccines really quickly
and prevent that strain from doing a significant
amount of damage.
I headed out to Seattle where they had detected
the first case of Covid in the community
to ask the scientists who've been on the frontline
of Covid detection and mutation surveillance,
are we any better prepared?
Yeah, sorry, this question makes me really mad.
I'm hoping we've learned a lot of lessons.
So we're in downtown Seattle.
When I started thinking through the question
of how do we assess whether or not we're any better prepared
for the next pandemic?
All my reporting actually led here.
And basically the reason Seattle was so prepared
by the time coronavirus came along is they had already
started a project called the Seattle Flu Study.
It started in 2018 and by 2019 they were doing
this swab and send program where people
could take a nasal swab,
which you probably had never thought of doing
before the coronavirus pandemic,
but people were doing it here just to figure out
what kind of respiratory illnesses
were circulating in the community.
Because they were in this position
and they were doing this work,
they found the first case of community-acquired Covid
in the U.S.
We're here to talk to the scientists who came up
with that project and who are hopefully gonna see that
through and perhaps expand it.
So the Seattle Flu Study started in 2018.
And at the time we called this the Seattle Flu Study,
mainly because when everybody is sick in the winter,
they think they have the flu, even if they don't.
And secondly, as a prototype pandemic preparedness platform,
everybody thought the next pandemic would be a flu
or an influenza.
So these are samples
from the Seattle coronavirus assessment network.
We're interested in what's going on in the community
with people who are infected with some respiratory pathogen,
they're not sick enough to go to the doctor.
What do they have and can we find it?
So when somebody signs up for the Seattle Flu Study,
usually it's because they've woken up
with some sort of illness and the person
follows the instructions to swab themselves
and put that swab safely in a tube in a specimen bag.
We test it for Covid and 20 something other pathogens.
We found out about coronavirus just like everybody else,
through the news.
We immediately saw that, hey, if we just turn on
a test for coronavirus at the same time,
we can be screening for all of these things
to understand what coronavirus looks like
in the community right now.
There was already a massive outbreak in Europe.
There was kind of no way that it wasn't here already.
We just weren't looking.
So it was really not surprising at all.
And we found one within the first 400 samples we ran.
The results of the sequencing that labs like Lea's get,
go into bigger systems that then feed
into a program called Nextstrain
that was created by Trevor Bedford.
So tell us what we're looking at here.
Oh boy.
So here we can see the viruses that were collected
over the course of the pandemic.
Trevor's work focuses on where mutations are
and how they spread around the world.
And it's work that he's done for other diseases,
particularly flu.
And that's part of the work that gets done
to like help build the new flu shots
and also work that's been adapted to tuberculosis,
Ebola, even Zika.
So it's the kind of genomic and scientific sequencing data
taken to the next level and shown in that real world,
here's where the threats are,
here's where the virus is emerging kind of way.
So there's many countries,
many geographies that didn't have any sequencing,
and now they're up sequencing thousands
of viruses every month.
And this is a huge step into the future.
How this whole thing works,
how this genomic surveillance works
is that right now people will get tested for coronarirus.
Each of those swabs will result in a 30,000 letter genome.
And so each of the samples will have
slightly different mutations in those 30,000 letters.
And you use that to look for variants that are emerging
and how they're spreading and kind of learn a lot
about both the evolution and epidemiology of the virus.
So this is viruses that are currently circulating,
that were collected from the very early pandemic.
So this is going to be Wuhan in January, 2020.
The first sequencing was really helpful
to establish human-to-human spread.
So this was at a time when China was downplaying
human-to-human spread, but Chinese scientists
were openly sharing their sequencing data.
And after that point, the sequencing was really helpful
to understand how it was spreading around the world.
And then subsequent, it's been really helpful
to understand variants and their spread
and whether one virus is more transmissible
than another virus.
Basically, if we can get the whole world to be having
the ability to detect and sequence Covid,
it would give us a headstart in terms
of when the next pandemic is emerging
as it could emerge from anywhere.
My intentions are,
and to the extent that I could have any influence on it,
there will be a broad, comprehensive approach
to pandemic preparedness and response at every level.
I mean, there have been calls recently
for increased pandemic preparedness
and building more capacity.
One might imagine in a future where there's
a lot of great respiratory disease surveillance,
people having a swab in their home.
And when they got that cough they would swab themselves
and then send that back to the lab
and they could test for multiple pathogens,
that would make a big difference.
My goal is to try to make this stuff a heck of a lot cheaper
so that we can kind of perform this sort of surveillance
without breaking the bank like we've been doing
for the last couple of years.
I'm just worried that before we can build something
like that on a national scale,
the political world will evaporate
and the appropriations will evaporate with it.
It's the work that's going on when there's not a pandemic
that really prepares us for pandemics.
And that probably sounds fairly obvious,
but it's really important to stop and realize
that we don't always fund that research.
For us to be really prepared and building better vaccines
that protect us against threats that exist,
we really need to be paying for basic research
to be going on all the time.
Without this kind of funding,
so much amazing scientific work could sit on shelf.
That's really unfortunate.
Scientists in South Africa
are warning of a new strain of Covid-19.
The variant, which is yet to be named
appears to have a high number of mutations.
In the weeks after going to Seattle, omicron emerged.
And it's remarkable when you think about the speed
at which the information about omicron was made available.
Had we not been sequencing
and had we not discovered omicron,
we would have just experienced a surge
in Covid cases with no reason.
And we would have had no understanding about that.
And the reason some of this is possible
is because of private money actually in public health.
Hi Rick.
There you are.
Welcome to us.
Rick Bright is a doctor who's worked in government
and several different positions.
He was a whistleblower under the Trump administration.
He came out publicly to air his concerns
about how the Trump administration
was handling pandemic preparedness.
Our economy is spiraling downward,
and our population is being paralyzed by fear
stemming from a lack of a coordinated response
and a dearth of accurate, clear communication
about the path forward.
But he since rejoined
the Biden Covid transition team,
and now is part of the Rockefeller Foundation
and he's heading up their pandemic preparedness institute.
I think governments move slowly.
They want to check and double check,
they want to evaluate things
and they wanna be absolutely certain
before they pull those triggers.
And I saw that with the MERS outbreak,
with the H1N1 influenza outbreak, with the Zika outbreak,
we've seen this repeatedly.
We need to have entities in place
and organizations in place in our country
that can be less risk averse,
that can be more nimble and flexible
so the world can know what's happening,
and scientists and the public can be able
to better respond to those newly emerging variants.
Do we have enough sequencing
and is it rapid enough for us to be able
to enact public health measures,
to really stem the tide of another wave
of serious infections?
Genomic surveillance alone can't do much,
but genomic surveillance and sequencing data
is a powerful dataset that we can use to target resources
to areas where we know there will be a surge in virus
to bolster the hospital systems to make sure
there are sufficient medical supplies in those areas
where we might see that virus emerging.
Genomic surveillance is a powerful leading indicator
that will allow us to target our medical countermeasures
and our healthcare response.
The Biden administration announced $1.7 billion
for improved sequencing, data sharing.
Is it enough money?
Do we need more money to really build the kind of systems
that we would say really have put the safeguards
in place that we need?
It was a lot of money.
I don't think the money has been distributed fully,
I don't think it has been distributed fast enough.
And we will be fighting this pandemic
in the rear view mirror until we get in front
of a solid, robust surveillance system
that will also target vaccine breakthrough
and reinfection cases.
Our vaccines are amazing,
they're wonderful and they're doing a wonderful job
until they don't.
And it's in those few cases when they don't
where we really need to harness
that genomic surveillance capability to ask why
We've made a lot of progress.
Don't discount that at all.
My biggest concern though, Cynthia,
is all of these things that we've learned,
even the things that we've done to make improvements
could just as easily be forgotten
the day after this pandemic ends.
We need to make sure that we're taking every step
to dig in and implement these new things
that we're learning for a new normal
going forward beyond the pandemic.
Are we more prepared, yes and no.
I think we know what we need to do,
and that's half the battle at least.
We know that we need to be stockpiling supplies
to build tests.
We know that testing is really important.
We know that surveillance is really important,
but I am not sure that we're going to be able to do that
in a nimble fashion, but I think science is ready.
There are reasons to be optimistic when you think
about pandemic preparedness now,
as compared to two years ago.
I think we do have a lot more sequencing capability
in the U.S. and in the world than we did previously
and a lot more of the scientific work is getting done.
But probably what's critically missing here
is the sustainability of funding.
And I think the other thing that we really need to consider
and make sure that is constantly in this conversation
is the benefits of sequencing are tailoring the vaccine
to make sure that it's more effective.
So we need sequencing going on all over the world,
but we need the benefits of that sequencing
to also flow through to the people who are providing
that scientific information.
That those countries are also getting the vaccine
and making sure that it really benefits the whole world,
not just a small sliver.