Hawaii's microbiologists, scientists and other laboratory experts have been busy trying to understand COVID-19 by collecting and analyzing data about the virus.
They aim to provide significant information to help epidemiologists learn how to control and curb its spread.
“Sequencing provides color to a black-and-white picture,” said Razvan Sultana, bioinformatician from the Hawaii Department of Health State Laboratories Division, according to a DOH news release. “We’re able to study new mutations and learn where they came from through their trail of ‘breadcrumbs.’ Biology used to look at a single gene just a few decades ago. Determining the whole sequence of a virus made of 30,000 letters used to be a tremendous feat. Today, for example, we look at all the 25,000 genes in the human DNA when we investigate what causes cancer. In the same way, we can determine all the letters in the SARS-Cov-2 virus, detecting changes from the original virus and allowing us to classify them as a specific variant. Doing this type of work requires a lot of computing power and complex algorithms.”
Razvan Sultana
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The Hawaii State Laboratories Division is finding the majority of the COVID-19 cases in the state are the result of variants that are more easily transmitted and can cause more severe illness, which can lead to hospitalizations and death. These are “variants of concern,” the DOH news release stated.
Apart from conducting its own sequencing, the Hawaii State Laboratories Division provides samples to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for sequencing every two weeks.
According to the release, a person who contracts the virus after being vaccinated will exhibit less severe symptoms. A full dose of the vaccine being administered to as many people as possible will help reduce hospitalizations and stress on the health care system.