Who Infected the President?
Genomic epidemiology can find the source of the Covid-19 outbreak at the White House. Curiously, no search is underway.
No one’s talking.
Source: Getty Images
One of the bizarre subplots of President Donald Trump’s illness has been the White House’s unwillingness to explore exactly how he contracted Covid-19. Offers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the outbreak have been rebuffed, leaving open pressing questions. Who gave the virus to the president, and where did that happen? To whom did he give it, and in what circumstances? Is the disease now sweeping through the White House all from a single source, and if so, who is the source? Twenty years ago it would have been all but impossible to answer those questions, but they can now be answered quickly and cheaply — so quickly and cheaply that I can’t help but wonder why we don’t already have the answers. I sat down with microbiologist Joe DeRisi, a co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, who is a pioneer of the use of genomic sequencing both to identify and to track infectious diseases. He has a few thoughts on the subject. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion.
Michael Lewis: When a person is tested for Covid, and their test turns out positive, that’s one piece of information you get — positive or not positive. But there’s other information there. What is that information?