Six public health labs in the US plan to start monitoring the general population for the new coronavirus this week. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the risk of the virus still remains low for the general population. But activating the disease surveillance network will allow the CDC and other public health officials to find any undetected virus circulating through the country. From a report: “It’s important because right now, all the efforts are focused on people who have a direct link to China, or a direct link to lab-confirmed cases. There’s no system in place to detect low-level transmission that might be under the radar,” says Edward Belongia, the director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The six labs — in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and New York City — are already part of the nationwide influenza surveillance network, and they conduct regular monitoring of all types of viruses. At the labs, samples from sick people are tested for various pathogens, creating a big-picture look at how much various diseases are spreading through the community. Surveillance hasn’t started yet, in part because of problems with the test for the novel coronavirus developed by the CDC. The test that will be used for surveillance that was designed to diagnose people who have symptoms of the illness caused by the virus called COVID-19. It was distributed to public health labs around the country last week, but the majority of the labs had trouble running it. The CDC says this often happens during the rollout of a new test, but it has not specified what the reasons for the errors are.

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Source: Slashdot – Labs in the US Will Start Looking For the New Coronavirus This Week