Commentary: We need to boost COVID-19 surveillance to detect new viral variants
Published by
Chicago Tribune
Chicago Tribune
In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” the title character played by Dustin Hoffman attends a post-graduation party where a partygoer beckons him from the boisterous crowd and gives him a single word of career advice that has become an iconic cinema quote: “Plastics.” As COVID-19 retreats in the midwinter, the one word of advice for our scientific community going forward is “surveillance.” The pandemic has forced us to relearn that public health surveillance — maintaining a watchful eye on new COVID-19 variants as well as other bacteria and viruses that threaten us — is the basis for preventing dise…