Abstract
The pandemic from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, including >15,000 in New York City (NYC). This pandemic highlighted a pressing clinical and public health need for rapid, scalable diagnostics that can detect SARS-CoV-2 infection, interrogate strain evolution, and map host response in patients. To address these challenges, we designed a fast (30 minute) colorimetric test to identify SARS-CoV-2 infection and simultaneously developed a large-scale shotgun metatranscriptomic profiling platform for nasopharyngeal swabs. Both technologies were used to profile 338 clinical specimens tested for SARS-CoV-2 and 86 NYC subway samples, creating a broad molecular picture of the COVID-19 epidemic in NYC. Our results nominate a novel, NYC-enriched SARS-CoV-2 subclade, reveal specific host responses in ACE pathways, and find medication risks associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection and ACE inhibitors. Our findings have immediate applications to SARS-CoV-2 diagnostics, public health monitoring, and therapeutic development.
Competing Interest Statement
N.T. and B.L. are employees at New England Biolabs.
Footnotes
Fixed a typo in the abstract.
