It's Tuesday, February. I'm Oscar Emiras from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is reopening America. It seems counterintuitive, but some COVID tests can't pick up on certain variants in their results, and labs are using those very same tests to flag if you might have the UK variant. If tests come back positive for COVID nineteen but fail a specific section of the test, that could be an indicator that someone is infected with the UK strain.
Brianna Abbott, health reporter at the Wall Street Journal, joins us for how some tests are being used to flag different COVID variants. Thanks for joining us, Branna, thanks for having me. We're seeing that there's a handful of COVID tests that, in one way can help flag these new variants that we're seeing out there. In another way they can't. So there's this handful of tests that can't really detect
a certain part of the UK variant. But in these tests where we see that this one little component might be missing, they're actually able to tell that it is this variant that is in the one that has infected the person. So Branna tell us a little bit about what we're seeing with these tests and how some of them are able to flag this UK variant. So it's
a little counterintuitive. Um So, basically the way that work is, as far as we know right now, the vast majority of COVID tests still work just fine on the variants. So if you're infected with the virus that that happens to be a variant like, the test will still come up as a positive. But um for just a handful of the test, one section of the test isn't working from the UK variants. So a lot of these tests
actually have multiple different parts. In one instance, this one test that we're talking about from Thermo Fish or Scientific actually has three different parts where it searches for three different chunks of the virus. Is genetic material. Now in the UK variant, there's actually a section of the genetic code in the spike protein area, which is something that folks may have heard of. It's one of the proteins that hangs on the surface of the virus that part
of the genetic code. Some of the tests can no longer pick that up. But the thing about that is it's actually more of a benefit than a detriment In some situations, because if you're looking at these test results and you see that one section of the test isn't working, but the two other sections still work, you can say that looks funny and that might actually be one of the variants that we're looking for. This is really important.
There's been a ton of calls for more genetic sequencing, more surveillance of these variants because we need to know what's circulating. This has to do with all sorts of things vaccines, tweaks to those things as well, So it's important to know what's going on here, and one failure in these tests is important if they're all clues to what's moving around. Now these testing questions, these are the PCR tests. They're not like the rapid response tests or
anything like that. Right, yes, let's correct these tests and question from this specific lab right now, what are they doing to either change the test or they just kind of going through with the ones that they have and just kind of flagging the ones that don't mark all
three sections. The company UM, which is sort of this big diagnostics company, is working on a software update that will go along with the tests that will sort of more easily flag when something like this occurs, so laboratories can see it and then send it off for a sequencing, and they're also sort of working on a new test that is able to specifically identify some of the key
variants that we're looking for. And sort of just to be clear about sort of what these tests are doing is they're slightly separate from the genomic sequencing, which sort of analyzes the genome of the virus that can tell her of helps figure out the variant that it is Infectually, these experts say that we're going to need a lot more of surveillance and genomic sequencing in general to keep track of these variants and that the flucan sort of these tests is helpful to a certain extent, but it
definitely can't get the job done by itself, and we sort of need wider screening as on a whole. And there's no cause for concern for many people. As you mentioned, if you have coronavirus, the tests are still going to pick that up. This has to do with kind of the arian and the way the tests work in targeting the spike protein. That's the thing in the case right with this, So of all the tests that are authorized looking at the virus genetic material about those don't target
the spike proteins. So the majority of tests are are going to be good enough to go through and get
accurate results at least. So a lot of these tests that are authorized right now, there is a risk that you know, the virus mutate and some of the tests become less sensitive, Like just like with vaccines and therapeutics, that's something that's on the table, but because up on the table, we've known that the entire time, just because you know, virus is mutate and spread, and so a lot of these tests look for multiple sections of the virus sort of as a way to combat the potential
for mutation. So like a lot of the robustness is sort of built right into the way that these tests are designed. But you're absolutely correct. A lot of the mutations for variants, not just with the UK variant, but with the one from South Africa as well. A lot of the mutations have happened on the spike protein, and a lot of the diagnostic tests, both the molecular ones and the rapid antigen ones, don't actually look for the spike protein. They look for other sections of the genome
or a different protein. So a lot of them aren't going to be affected by the mutations that we're seeing so far. And going back to what you were saying about surveillance and sequencing of the of the genomes and all, the Biden administration has said that the CDC is going to invest about two million dollars to scale up this stuff any other things that the administration is looking forward
to doing on this front. The CDC sort of first tried to launch a national surveillance system for this viral sequencing sort of back in November when we sort of realize that these variants of concerned we're cropping up in the US, we're pretty far behind sequencing compared to somewhere like the UK, which identified it's variant sort of because if it's robust sequence things, we don't actually know sort of all of the variants that might be circulating in
the US right now, just because we really haven't been looking for them. So that's something that public health experts are really sort of keen to gear up on. The Biden administration sort of is on board, like we said, with the money from the CDC to do this, So it's definitely something that health officials are pushing for as we start to continuously see this virus muta and change sort of as it continues to spread. Brianna Abbott, health reporter at The Wall Street Journal, thank you very much
for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm Oscar Emiras and this has been reopening America. Don't forget difference today's big news stories. You can check me out of the Daily Dive podcast every money through Fridays, so follow us on iHeart Radio or wherever you get your podcast