Detecting Other Variants of COVID-19

Kristy Murray

Prior to the partnership with Baylor, Belize’s capacity to diagnose certain illnesses was limited and the turnaround time for samples sent abroad for testing was rather lengthy.  What the technicians are also learning is how to detect other variants of the COVID-19 virus.

Dr. Kristy Murray, Professor of Pediatrics

“Before we started this, capacity here was quite limited in terms of the technology, a lot of the samples that they needed to diagnose they would have to send out of country to get tested.  The time to get those results back was long and just the resources to be able to do it was limited.  With this we are able to do much more expansive testing and look for things that we might not otherwise think of and really get a good picture of what’s really happening in the country.  Actually, what we’re able to do now is look at who has antibodies against COVID-19.  So what we’re doing upstairs is looking at healthcare workers in particular.  Of course, they are incredibly high-risk for exposure to COVID-19 and we want to make sure that they are protected.  So these are the baseline samples before they get vaccinated and we can look and see how many of them had actually been exposed to COVID and then once we have vaccines onboard which has all been happening over the past couple weeks, we’ll be getting another sample from them to see if that antibody response is robust enough to protect them. It’s a very long, very expensive process to do sequencing, so right now we have, I think around, twenty-six that we’ve gotten really good sequence results from.  But already in those twenty-six samples we have two that were the UK variant and we also have a couple that were a different variant from the main or majority of them.  So what that’s gonna allow us to do is go back and track and see who these individuals are and especially where they were so that we can tell if this is something that’s a concern, is this a new variant that’s spreading?  And then again, with the vaccine, are we protected against this variant in particular?”