quote:

https://time.com/6331503/airport-covid-flu-rsv-tracking/ posted:

Here’s How the CDC Will Track Viruses Over the Holiday Travel Season
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In the latest iteration of the program, passengers at four airports—John F. Kennedy in New York, San Francisco International, Logan in Boston, and Dulles—volunteer to swab their noses and Ginkgo genetically analyzes any positive tests at its labs for the presence of SARS-CoV-2, influenza, and RSV.
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In coming years, the program will add testing for dozens of other viruses and bacteria, as well as for mutations that signal that viruses or bacteria have become resistant to existing treatments. Eventually, Friedman says her team is hoping take air samples from airports to provide additional data on pathogens, and to bolster the program’s ability to know where in the world pathogens are coming from, and whether the strains entering the country pose any threat to public health because existing treatments won’t be able to control them.

One group of such pathogens that will eventually be screened include the parainfluenzas, which can contribute to croup or pneumonia, and can be dangerous for young babies. “There are no public genomes for some of these respiratory pathogens—none for parainfluenza 3, for example, and none for human metapneumovirus—so we will be getting the first sequences that we are able to look at more closely,” says Casandra Philipson, a computational biologist at Concentric. “We’re excited about establishing a global baseline dataset for these viruses. The more we make public, the more we can contribute to better general knowledge about these pathogens.”