’Need to know how virus is changing’: WHO explains ways to identify new variants

In order to identify new COVID variants, testing is critical, World Health Organisation pointed out. But if you’re living in a developing country where you might spend five or ten dollars per person on health for the whole year, five antigen tests or ten antigen tests are massively expensive. Recently, WHO chief scientist Dr. Soumya Swaminathan also pointed out, one-third of the nations across the globe are not performing COVID-19 genomic sequencing owing to its high cost. Meanwhile, WHO chief pointed out that inequitable access to vaccines and tests in many countries combined with high transmission is creating an ideal condition for new variants to emerge.