CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- The scientists who found the first evidence of the Omicron COVID variant in Chicago had been looking for it for the past week.
The Omicron variant was found at the Regional Innovative Public Health Laboratory at Rush University Medical Center. Genomic epidemiologist and virologist Hannah Barbian, PhD said the lab had been working for the past several days to get the processes in place to detect Omicron as quickly as possible.
“We got some signal on Monday in our laboratory test that we might have an Omicron sample so we really quickly prepped that sample for sequencing, got it on the sequencer. That takes about 24 hours so we just got results yesterday afternoon.”
Dr. Barbian said the lab had developed a process that would quickly “get a signal that says, ‘Hey, this virus might be omicron.’”
Finding the first evidence of the Omicron variant in Illinois was not cause for breaking out champagne. “We were happy that we have done our job, but it certainly isn’t the joyous occasion of good data, because it means Omicron is here and we need to continue working really hard to see exactly how the virus is spreading in Chicago.”
Dr. Barbian said the lab gets a couple of hundred virus samples each week from 16 Chicago hospitals. The whole purpose of the lab is to do genomic surveillance of COVID and screen samples for whatever variant they are.
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