The Biden administration on Friday announced its plans to invest $1.7 billion into tracking and combating COVID-19 variants as new strains make up about half of all infections across the nation.
The administration unveiled its planned distribution of federal funding from the American Rescue Plan directed at assisting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local governments in detecting and monitoring COVID-19 variants.
Part of the commitment involves designating money to improve genomic sequencing of COVID-19 samples, which helps scientists identify variants and “potentially deadly mutations.”
he CDC will allocate the funding that intends to boost genomic sequencing from its current level of about 29,000 COVID-19 strains per week. In February, the U.S. was sequencing about 8,000 samples per week until the administration funneled almost $200 million to increase the pace.
“Thanks to today’s funding from the American Rescue Plan, states and the CDC will expand that even further and, importantly, provide states with more resources to expand their own efforts to increase geographic coverage of sequencing to better detect emerging threats like variants,” the White House said in a release.
“This will mean that both existing and any new COVID variants could be detected faster, before they grow prevalent,” it added.
The plan allocates $1 billion to bolstering genomic sequencing through providing money to laboratories, including state laboratories, for collecting COVID-19 samples, sequencing the DNA and releasing the data. States, territories and five local governments in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles County, New York City and Philadelphia will receive a portion of the funding.
A total of $400 million will go toward innovation initiatives, including creating six Centers of Excellence in Genomic Epidemiology that will work with state health departments and academic institutions to research genomic sequencing. ...
