Role of gene testing in identifying different variants of SARS-CoV-2

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a tough time for the health care sector all over the world. The newest development came in after World Health Organization announced the tracking of two new sub-lineages of the Omicron variant known as BA.4 and BA.5. WHO’s report suggests that many countries lack proper infrastructure for genome sequencing and using S-gene target failure will enable faster identification of Omicron cases, especially where the genome sequencing capacity is low. Also, while S-gene target failure was successful in detecting all the other Omicron sub-variants, the test is posed with the limitations of not being able to detect the BA.2 sub-variant. Genome sequencing is a time-driven procedure and even if we can sequence all Covid-19 samples in India, the S-gene target failure still be the fastest way to detect Omicron cases.