McMaster researcher traces spread of COVID-19 in Canada

Canadian medical researchers are turning their genetics labs into virus detective agencies to show how COVID-19 spread throughout the country, and where each case originated. One of those labs is at McMaster University. Andrew Mcarthur, the director of the biomedical discovery and commercialization program at McMaster, says the genetic material in the virus can be used to create a road map to show how this virus spreads. McArthur’s lab is one of many across Canada involved in the 40-million-dollar genome Canada COVID-19 project. Medical researchers say while the coronavirus isn’t mutating a lot, it is changing just enough to allow them to link individual cases. The genetics labs are using supercomputers to compare the genetic material from versions of the coronavirus isolated from blood samples of thousands of Canadians.