The SARS-CoV-2 virus swept across the globe at the beginning of 2020, and one of the earliest and hardest-hit areas of the United States was New Jersey.
Hackensack Meridian Health , the state’s largest and most comprehensive health network, played a major role in virus detection and tracking of the virus’s evolution and dynamics, due to the expertise of the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI), the network’s research institute.
Now the CDI experts have published their findings in tracking nasal swabs of thousands of patients over a critical 18-month period of the pandemic, with the results published this month in the journal Viruses .
Many of the findings reinforce common understandings of the COVID-19 pandemic - but the data provides compelling new evidence about how important vaccination is.
“Overall, the results reinforce the positive impact of COVID-19 vaccination and the public health benefits of conducting genotypic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 across a large hospital network,” conclude the authors, led by José Mediavilla, M.B.S., M.P.H., infectious disease laboratory supervisor in the laboratory of Barry Kreiswirth, Ph.D., and co-first author Tara Lozy, biostatistician.
The facts established include:
“This was an important undertaking,” said Mediavilla. “We look at this as one source of ground truth for the changing epidemiology of this pandemic, so that science can better understand real-time evolution of a high-threat respiratory virus.”
Other authors on the paper include: Kreiswirth, who is also a professor at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine; David Perlin, Ph.D., the chief scientific officer and executive vice president of the CDI, also on faculty at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine; Yanan “Nancy” Zhao, M.D., Ph.D., of the CDI, also with the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine faculty; other colleagues from the CDI and Hackensack Meridian Health, including the Hackensack Meridian Health Research Institute’s Biorepository; and also colleagues from the New York Genome Center and the New Jersey Department of Health, who were partners in the sequencing project.
The lessons learned from molecular studies of SARS-CoV-2 and its ability to overcome protection from vaccination and natural infection could be a cautionary tale, as preparation begins for the rollout of new vaccines against viral threats like respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Viruses
Observational study
Human tissue samples
Molecular and Clinical Epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2 Infection among Vaccinated and Unvaccinated Individuals in a Large Healthcare Organization from New Jersey
5-Aug-2023
The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript; or in the decision to publish the results.