As COVID-19 cases surge again in the United States, coronavirus variants are on the rise. But the country is not ramping up surveillance of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 , allowing variants — which evidence shows could make vaccines less effective — to spread undetected in one of the countries hit hardest by the disease. In the meantime, the CDC and vaccine advocates are calling for mass vaccination for those who are at nearly non existent covid risk of severe disease or death. Perhaps having a complete hard data that vaccine escaping variants are dominant could be the reason why over 98% of tests in the US are just thrown away& not tested for variants ?

Laboratories supported by the US government have doubled the rate at which they are sequencing SARS-CoV-2 genomes over the past two months. Still, the number of genomes that the country shared in the online genome repository GISAID in March represented only 1.6% of its positive COVID-19 cases that month. And the United States lags behind at least 30 countries in terms of the sequencing it has done throughout the pandemic, according to GISAID data