The move is one of three actions officials announced Wednesday aimed at boosting testing. The administration will also invest $650 million to help improve testing for K-8 schools as well as other gathering places like homeless shelters. Another $815 million will go toward ramping up domestic manufacturing of testing supplies.
The sequencing effort to track the variants is one of the most urgent, though, given that experts say greatly expanding the current capability is crucial to understanding how widely the concerning coronavirus variants are spreading, and identifying new possible variants.
Carole Johnson, the White House testing coordinator, said the new funds will allow a threefold increase in genomic sequencing, up to 25,000 samples a week, though she did not provide a timeline for when that threshold will be met. ...
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