The Philadelphia Department of Public Health has opened a new lab to study the genetic makeup of the virus that causes COVID-19, which will help health officials learn more about variants that are circulating in the region.

Since the pandemic began, labs across the world have studied the genetic data of virus samples to answer important questions like: how is the virus changing, which variant is spreading most quickly, and where did a particular outbreak come from?

The U.S. lagged behind many other countries, like the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Vietnam, when it comes to doing this genome sequencing for virus samples. A 2020 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said, for instance, that sources of coronavirus genome sequence data in the U.S. – and efforts to integrate that with clinical and epidemiological data – were “patchy, typically passive, reactive, uncoordinated, and underfunded.”

The percentage of cases where the virus samples are sequenced varies by state. Around 2.5% of cases in Pennsylvania are sequenced, compared to around 3.3% of cases in New Jersey, and 5.6% of cases in Delaware.

In Philadelphia, labs at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) analyzed the city’s virus samples.

Dr. Paul Planet, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at CHOP, estimated that around 60% of the virus samples his lab sequenced came from the hospital system itself, and the rest came from the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.

“This has been a race from the very beginning,” Planet said. “We really had to run to catch up with the information that people wanted about circulating variants.”

Now, Philadelphia’s health department is catching up – and Lab Director Bernadette Matthis said having genome sequencing capabilities will allow the city to study virus samples much more quickly, compared to when testing was performed at outside labs.

“The turnaround times for them to get the sequence of specimens turned out to be about a month or longer,” Matthis said. “Now that…