“If we had configured it in 2019, when this virus hit the United States, we would have immediate access to the data that would have allowed us to see it circulating in New York City, for example, without doing anything different,” Dr. Mina said.
Although the observatory was unable to identify the new coronavirus, it would have revealed an unusually high number of infections in the coronavirus family, which includes those that cause common colds. It may also have shown that the new coronavirus was interacting with patients’ immune systems in unexpected ways, resulting in telltale markers in the blood. That would have been a signal to begin genetic sequencing of patient samples, to identify the culprit, and it could have provided reasons to close the city earlier, Mina said. (Likewise, serology would not be able to detect the emergence of a new variant of the virus, such as the contagious variants of the coronavirus that were discovered in South Africa and England before spreading elsewhere. should rely on standard genomic sequencing of virus test samples.)
A powerful investment
The observatory would require agreements with hospitals, blood banks and other blood sources, as well as a system for obtaining consent from patients and donors. It also faces the funding problem, noted Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington. It is unlikely that health insurers will pay the bill, as serology tests are generally not used by doctors to treat people.
Dr. Mina estimated that the observatory would cost about $ 100 million to take off. He pointed out that, according to his calculations, the federal government has more than doubled the diagnostics company Ellume to produce Covid tests fast enough to cover American demand for just a few days. A pathogen observatory, he said, is like a weather forecasting system that relies on a large number of buoys and sensors around the globe, passively reporting events where and when they arise. These systems were financed by government grants and are widely valued.
The predictive power of serology is worth the investment, said Jessica Metcalf, a Princeton epidemiologist and one of the observatory’s team members. A few years ago, she and her collaborators found in a minor survey that measles immunity was frighteningly low in Madagascar. In fact, in 2018, an outbreak occurred, killing more than 10,000 children.
Now, half a million plasma samples in Dr. Mina’s freezers, collected by plasma donation company Octopharma on sites across the country last year, are beginning to undergo serological tests focused on the new coronavirus, funded by a donation $ 2 million from Open Philanthropy. The tests had to wait for the researchers to set up a new robotic test facility and process the samples, but now they are working on their first batches.