As COVID-19 variants emerge, Rush launches a lab to track and monitor new virus strains

“This is not the time to relax,” said Stefan Green, co-principal investigator at the lab and director of the Genomics and Microbiome Core Facility at Rush. “We’ve made tremendous progress over the past month or so, but we still are at an extremely high level of COVID overall. That means higher numbers of virus, and that also means a higher possibility of new variants developing. So that the more virus you have, the more replications you have and the more chances you have of developing something new.”