NEW ORLEANS — We don’t usually think of scientists as detectives.
But for some, that’s what they are: Disease detectives.
And right now, there’s a lot of gumshoe work happening.
It’s all to figure out where the virus has been -- an important piece of information.
“We need to trace the spread of this virus in the human population to know where it might be going in the future, how efficiently it passes from person to person, what kind of situations are we seeing the virus transmitted in,” said Bob Garry, a professor of microbiology at Tulane University Medical Center.
Early research is leading scientists to look at New York City as a place where the outbreak of COVID-19 took root.
But that research is far from complete, and it’s too soon to say anything one way or the other.
At the same time, 49 samples taken from people in New Orleans did link back to the New York area.
“The analysis so far is not very well refined. So we need to get more sequences, more data to figure out exactly how this virus has been spreading around the country,” Garry said. “We don’t have enough information right now.”
Virologists like Garry use microscopic clues to figure that out.
Just like we all have unique fingerprints, each coronavirus has minor mutations that make it unique.
Think about it like snow. On the ground, it all looks the same. Under a microscope, you see the intricate patterns of each flake.'
That’s a lot like a virus.
“And when you analyze all these substitutions together … we can learn quite a bit about how the virus is spread, where it’s come from and hopefully predict where it might be going,” Garry said.
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