WVU and Marshall still responsible for identifying state's variants as Delta moves in

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WCHS) — Back in March, West Virginia University and Marshall University teamed up to start breaking apart strands of COVID-19 identifying variants, a process called sequencing.

At that time, West Virginia had only about two dozen cases of the UK variant. Now, as colors start to change again on the state DHHR's map and the Delta variant becomes dominant, that is the main concern.

Dr. Peter Stoilov, an associate professor at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, is responsible for leading the lab that sequences the variants.

“Even if we catch some of them, they’re just small blips on the radar," he said. "The dominant variant is the Delta."

The process is still the same as it was before. However, the labs at West Virginia University are now testing for variants from across the state rather than just small samples like before. Once they sequence out the virus strands, they send it over to Marshall University where Dr. Jim Denvir takes a look to see if it matches up.

“We have some staff that we trained in the meantime, so I’m really not very much hands-on with the equipment, but we are more supervising it," Stoilov said.

Even though they are identifying more variants than before, they still have excess capacity and funds from the CDC and NIH to keep going. They just added extra staff.

“We’re doing about 100 samples per week, so hopefully this is not going to pick up too much now that we see a rise in the case numbers," he said.

However, the variant sequencing team and state health officials warn that the days of the original COVID-19 strand are long gone.

“This is a different disease," COVID-19 Czar Dr. Clay Marsh said. "This is much worse, and I don’t want to be overly dramatic, but the more I’m learning about this, the more I’m worried.”

What is concerning for them is how quickly it is spreading. Stoilov said in studying these variants, they would see the UK variant spread from a newly-infected person to another in one week. The Delta variant does it in four days.

“It tends to replicate faster so people that are infected actually have more virus in them, so they’re spreading it not just faster but with a larger quantity," he said.

Both are still stressing the importance of vaccination especially against the Delta variant.

You can hear more about that here in Stoilov's extended interview: