Reasearch institutions/hospitals are doing what-kind-of-variant testing in more a structured study kind of way. Looks like normal people cant just get variant testing easily.
>The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service (CMS), which oversees the regulatory process for US labs, requires genome-sequencing tests to be federally approved before their results can be disclosed to doctors or patients. These are the tests that pick up on variants, but right now, there's little incentive for the labs to do the work to validate those tests.
Seems to be a side-effect of reasonable laws that weren't written with emergency-use authorisation pandemic measures in mind, and pharma lawyers following the letter of the law to avoid liability. Should be easy enough to fix with, at worst, an executive order.
the article title is a bit of a mismatch for the situation.
the TLDR is that the sequencing method that is used to comprehensively reveal variant character [rather than general presence] must be federally approved in order to be coupled to PII.
there is still surveilance sequencing occuring and that is how variants are detected.
presently delta is upfront Variant of Concern [VOC] however is not the only VOC and the possibility of new variation being generated during extended periods of transmision is always a possibility of concern.
you are allowed to know what variant, however the health system is not allowed to accidentally mislead you regarding variant, by way of using a nonconclusive sequencing method
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 26.2 ms ] threadSeems to be a side-effect of reasonable laws that weren't written with emergency-use authorisation pandemic measures in mind, and pharma lawyers following the letter of the law to avoid liability. Should be easy enough to fix with, at worst, an executive order.
the TLDR is that the sequencing method that is used to comprehensively reveal variant character [rather than general presence] must be federally approved in order to be coupled to PII.
there is still surveilance sequencing occuring and that is how variants are detected.
presently delta is upfront Variant of Concern [VOC] however is not the only VOC and the possibility of new variation being generated during extended periods of transmision is always a possibility of concern.
you are allowed to know what variant, however the health system is not allowed to accidentally mislead you regarding variant, by way of using a nonconclusive sequencing method