Since the pandemic began, a crack team of scientists have been working to track Covid variants as they appear, to try to stop them from spreading. The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, has been speaking to some of them
At the end of last year, a crack team of British scientists discovered a new coronavirus variant that would spread across the world. The Guardian’s health editor, Sarah Boseley, tells Rachel Humphreys about how the scientists went about tracing the variant.
The UK is world-leading in its genomic sequencing and surveillance. When the coronavirus first reached the UK, genomic scientists began a major collaborative effort to sequence samples from people who had fallen ill. The Covid-19 Genomics UK (Cog-UK) consortium included the four public health agencies, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and more than a dozen universities. All viruses evolve and change over time; a virus with one or two mutations is called a variant. Genome sequencing aims to track those changes, which most of the time are insignificant. By late December, the UK was responsible for about half of all the world’s genome sequencing of the coronavirus.
