Oregon Health Authority will update data source for ‘variant of concern’ dashboard, April 2

Since Feb. 3, OHA has been reporting a cumulative count of each variant of concern on its Tableau dashboard. These counts have been based on information reported directly to public health by laboratory partners. On March 16, CDC reclassified the B.1.427 and B.1.429 variants as “variants of concern”. These variants have been circulating in Oregon since late 2020 and had not been previously reportable. OHA has reviewed historical data in the open-source sequencing data platform GISAID and has identified more than 190 B.1.427 and B.1.429 variants to date in Oregon. In order to provide a comprehensive picture of variant circulation in Oregon, OHA will begin updating its variant of concern counts using GISAID data. This will allow OHA to rapidly report historical data whenever CDC definitions of variants of concern are updated. The OHA variant of concern dashboard will be updated with GISAID data on April 2, 2021, and will be updated every Wednesday moving forward. Oregon will continue to ask all laboratory partners to promptly report all variants of concern (B.1.1.7, B.1.351, P.1, B.1.427 and B.1.429) and variants of interest (B.1.525, B.1.526, P.2) to public health in order to inform case investigation and contact tracing.