COVID-19 to be tested for variants.Brad Wouters, executive vice-president of science and research at University Health Network, said failing to do this will only make getting the pandemic under control more difficult. “The window is closing, we know there is community spread,” Wouters said.“There is an urgent need for us to go find these variants.”To find a variant, positive cases of COVID-19 are run through a second sequencing process to get a closer look at the genetic code.
The challenge is that this process typically takes awhile to complete.But researchers said a technology used at a research lab in Toronto can speed things up.