Prognosis Daily: The Coronavirus Detectives

from today. The US Senate passed a historic two trillion dollar relief package late on Friday morning, which promises to deliver payments and benefits to individuals, businesses, and states affected by the pandemic. Italy had its deadliest twenty four hours, recording almost one thousand fatalities from the virus in one day. Spain's death rate also soared. Cases are jumping in the United Kingdom and the US raised past China to become

the country with the most cases in the world. Meanwhile, in China, where the outbreak began, virtually all the latest cases came from people arriving from overseas, prompting the government to temporarily suspend the entry of foreigners with valid visas and residence permits in the US. A deal to produce life saving ventilators that a massive scale faltered as President

Donald Trump attacked manufacturers. Carmakers General Motors, and Ford, as well as medical device manufacturer Ventech Life Systems, were set to ramp up production of the breathing machines, waiting on the Trump administration to place orders and cut checks, but then the President published a series of angry tweets accusing GM of moving too slowly and charging too much, calling on the company to produce the machines in an Ohio

plant it no longer owns. Later, GM said it would stop waiting on a federal contract and produce the machines at an Indie, Yana plant. GM says it can eventually ramp up to making as many as one hundred thousand ventilators per day. Other carmakers are contributing to the effort to mass produce badly needed supplies. Toyota is planning to use its shut down car plants in the US to make masks and face shields. The company said it would start producing these items early next week to supply hospitals

near its plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, and Texas. It's also finalizing deals with medical supply companies to make ventilators and respirator hoods. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson reported on Friday that he had tested positive for COVID nineteen and with suffering symptoms including a fever and persistent cough. The United Kingdom is seeing an overall surge in cases with deaths from the virus jumping. And now for our main story,

the coronavirus detectives. If you wanted to learn everything you could about an organism, a good place to start would be its genome. The genome is the complete set of genetic information found in the d n A of any and every organism, whether that's a human being, a plant, or even a virus. And inside hundreds of viral genomes from patients around the globe there may be clues to where the infection came from and, most importantly, where it's

going next. A little known geneticist in Seattle has become something of a c s I detective unraveling the origins of COVID nineteen in the US. Could his research hold secrets to a better understanding of the disease. Some policy makers seem to think so. I talked to Bloomberg's Bob lang Grath for more scientists around the world have been trying to analyze COVID nineteen figure out exactly where this

vibe came from. And you've been talking to one of these scientists, Trevor Bedford, and I was just hoping you could tell us a little bit about his research just to start off. So he is one of a he's at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research gener and he's one of a new breed of epidemiologists that doesn't do kind of the shoe leather work this traditional epidemiologists, which is

tracking all the cases and finding other contacts. Instead, you know, he kind of sits by the laptop with a handful of collaborators around the world and waits for new UH genome data genome sequencing data from patients that have had

the virus for it to come in. So he analyzes the genome data over time to see, you know, how the virus is muted, and that gives some clues as to you know, how it is spreading, where is it coming from, and what places are starting to have new clusters next, So how can scientists predict where these clusters go and how they travel. You can think of its sort of like a genetic family trees of the virus.

As the virus spreads from one person to the next to the next, there are occasional small mutations in the virus and uh, you know, most of these mutations, they don't change how your sycomics people, or don't change anything functional about the virus, but they do allow the genetic detectives, the kind of genome genetic detectives as I like to call them, uh, to kind of track the virus in

near real time. And his one of his big breakthroughs came three or four weeks ago at a time when a lot of people in public health authorities in the US thought we had a kind of mostly under control. And as he was analyzing genomes in the virus case it was detected in a teenager in Washington, one of

the first community cases. He found that it was almost identical to the virus in the very first Washington case in January, and that indicated to him very strongly, to Dr Bedford, that the community spread in Washington was closely linked to that first Washington case in January, and in fact, it had been spreading undetected in Washington for quite a few weeks. So basically it was a kind of early

alarm signal you can get by tracking these viral genomes. Yeah, and I'm hoping perhaps that this might actually help us predict where the virus is going next and perhaps how long it will last. Are there elements to his research that give us some indication to that extent as well. You know, you can't predict whether someone is going to get on a plane uh and flat to some new destination or sneak into some new destination and then that patient is sick and spreads the virus. It can't really

predict that. But what what it's very good at doing this genetic work is kind of piecing together seemingly outbreaks and case clusters that may appear on the surface to be unrelated because these patients that got sick around the same time in one geographic area like in Washington, you

didn't have any obvious contacts or points of contact. But when you look at the genetics and looks very similar, that gives you an indication the fact might be related and and might have derived from some of the same original index cases and that so it's kind of an early warning signal that helps supplement traditional epidemiology method that seems to be a really important element of the fact that Dr Bedford isn't working alone but with this global team,

and that the global team really allows him to get this almost real time data about where the virus came from, the details of how it's spreading. How is he sinking up with this team that scattered essentially across the globe. Trevor Bedford is at in Seattle at the fred Hut Cancer Center and one of his main collaborators is at the Universe of Bosel, Switzerland, So and that's a nine

hour time difference. And then as it happens, he also has another researcher in his lab who's from New Zealand and apparently got I wanted to go back to New Zealand, so that researcher, as luck would have it, is working you know, from home in New Zealand. So they have as it turns out, even though it's a small group of people, they have people in three very disparate time zones. That kind of allows them to you know, get an analyzed data and almost real time as it comes in.

And how exactly are they sharing the data? Is this publicly available? Can any would go and see the real time research. Dr Bedford and his collaborators they have software there was basically ready to go already. They've been working on this for a while, they and so they've for influenza,

for a Bowl and for other outbreaks. So they basically it's software ready to go that can analyze and compare the different viruses and how they've mutated, you know, very quickly that can you give us some results in twenty to thirty minutes. So they have a website, a interactive website called next train dot org and that is updated, you know, frequently with new viral data as it comes in. And they literally put up like these little I call

virus family trees that the technical name is bhilogenies. But they show like a different you know, clusters of virus and you know, how they've mutated over time, and like what parts of the world they've come from. And so it's a powerful technique. It provides you know, circumstantial not definitive evidence, but circumstantial, very strong, circumstantial evidence for how the virus spread and which towns it has come from

and gone to. But it's not just this website. Dr Bedford seems to have become a bit of a social media filipper by sharing his work online. Dr Bedford is a very good at using Twitter u and these Twitter threads. You know, he now has more than a hundred seventy thousand Twitter followers. It was pretty amazing from someone who know, previously was an obscure computational biologist, you know, known to people in his field, but you know, not outside his

very technical field. And now he's being followed by public health experts around the world, including former FDA commissioners, as being kind of one of the most prescient commentators, you know, And what's happening with this virus, how do you see maybe policymakers starting to use and apply Bedford's work more broadly again to hopefully stop the spread of the virus

more generally. Yes, he is, uh, he told me he was in regular contact with people are both at the CDC and the public health authorities in his state, Washington, because obviously Washington was the first state to be heavily hit by the coronavirus in the in the US obviously it's been now surpassed by New York. So he's in regular contact with you know, public health authorities and basically

although they're putting all the data out there. I mean, it is the genome data is it's kind of like a new thing for epidemiologists that traditionally trained epidemiologists, you know, might not have as much expertise and interpreting it. And so he's in regular contact with the health authorities, you know, to tell him, hey, here's what I think this means this new set of data. You know, here's what you make of it, Here's what you think of it. So

he's regularly talking to to the various health authorities. Bob Blankra, thank you very much, great, thank you, And that's it for the Prognosis Daily Edition. For more on the coronavirus crisis from a hundred and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you appreciate the podcast, please take a moment to rate us and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is

hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by me To for Foreheads, Orton Gospore, and Magnus Henriksen. Reporting by Jason Gale. Original music by Leo sidron Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesca Levie is Bloomberg's head of podcasts,