The New Weapon in the Covid-19 War
This is worth reading the whole article.
Snip
What you see here is a portrait of the genetic relationships of all the Covid-19 found in a four-square-block area of San Francisco in late April. A few weeks after the results were gathered, I sat in a room at the Biohub staring at a version of this image, trying to figure out what it meant. DeRisi and eight of his protégées — eight Hanna Retallacks — were beside me, turning their minds to this new problem.
The first thing they explained to me was that viruses mutate, in ways big and small, but they make errors in themselves at different rates. A perfectly stable virus — that is, a virus that does not mutate — would leave no meaningful fingerprints. Everyone infected by it would have the exact same virus. The virus genome would be able to say nothing about where they got it, or how, or from whom. On the other hand, if the virus was a lot less stable — if it mutated, as some do, many times inside a single person — its fingerprints would be smudged beyond recognition. From the point of view of a virus hunter, Covid-19 is, as DeRisi put it, “in the sweet spot. It mutates once every two or so transmissions.” Its fingerprints are rife with meaning and easy to track. You can tell where it’s been and follow its journey along the way, judging by how it’s changed.
The starting point for the diagram is not in the San Francisco neighborhood but in Wuhan, where the virus originated in early December. Zero means zero mutations. Drop in on any cluster of figures in the chart and you begin to see stuff that’s nearly impossible for virus hunters to see with the naked eye. Look at the household with the middle annotation. Three people in the same household were infected with the same virus. No big news there. One of them likely gave it to the others.
The news is how it entered the household — likely from the Mission resident on the same line. He or she has the exact same virus but contracted it earlier, which is why he or she has antibodies (marked with yellow). Without the genetic connection, you might never have any idea that these people had any sort of relationship at all. Even if a test had identified the person who infected the household, and that person was grilled by teams of contact tracers, the connection with the household might never have been made. The person might not even be aware of the connection, or might know it and want to hide it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-opinion-chan-zuckerberg-biohub-covid-tracing/?srnd=opinion-technology-and-ideas&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&utm_medium=social&utm_content=view&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic
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