Two years into the pandemic, Florida’s monitoring system for COVID has left the public blind to the arrival of highly contagious variants.
Florida sends only a tiny fraction of all positive COVID tests to labs for genetic sequencing to learn their strain of coronavirus — only 1% over the entire pandemic.
Some states, such as Washington, are sequencing up to 20% of all cases. With so few samples sequenced in Florida, health officials lack the ability to track variants and their prevalence across the state until cases surge.
