ML: In what way do you think it's more than just academic interest?
JD: The use of the sequencing to understand how a virus flows is certainly more than academic, and in this case it can help us understand the situations that lead the virus to spread. These are the ones we need to interrupt and stop.
ML: I'm trying to think if there has been another outbreak like this where you would have had such a detailed record of exactly where these people had been during the period in which they became infected. It's almost like a stage play, where they're moving from scene to scene. It's all on camera or at least recorded somewhere.
JD: I can't think of any better case in which to use the technology because you know where everybody was at every single moment. Plus, this has endangered the security of the president of the United States and should be taken with the utmost seriousness.
ML: So why wouldn't somebody want to know how the armed assailant got through a window? Can you imagine any reasons why? It’s perplexing to me because it seems so obvious.
JD: I am just as perplexed as you are.
ML: When you did your genomic contact-tracing study in San Francisco’s Mission, I remember thinking: Who wouldn't want this information? And then I looked at the information and thought: Well, if I was the guy down the hall having an affair with the married woman at the other end of the hall and I didn’t want anybody to know about that and we both had Covid, I certainly wouldn't want that social relationship exposed. And that's what the genomic sequencing does: It exposes social relationships that might not have been in plain sight. And so I wonder if that's at the bottom of the kind of squeamishness about this.
JD: Hard to know.
ML: If I sent you to Washington to do it, how long would it take you if everybody cooperated?
JD: If everybody cooperated, if we had all the samples in one place, it would take a couple of days to get it done.
ML: And at the end of that, what would we have?
JD: We would have a map of the viruses, the sequence of the viruses, that we would then put on a family tree to understand which viruses are related to which people. And it’s unknown what the result would be because we haven't done the experiment, but one might expect to see that if the president's viral strain and other people that are at the Rose Garden or other meetings were the same, you could conclude with reasonable confidence that there was a very close transmission chain among them. Likewise, if the viral family tree says all these strains are very different, you can rule out that they transmitted the virus to each other.
ML: Could you find out if the president picked it up himself in, say, Minnesota? How possible would it be to track that event?
JD: It depends on how many of the viral genomes are getting sequenced from all those different places in states where he’s been. If he had been, for example, here in California, there's a good chance that many of those viruses would've been sequenced because we're doing a lot of sequencing here. But some states aren't doing it at all, so it really depends on where that virus was picked up for us to be able to have any reasonable idea of where it was last.
ML: Just like a database of fingerprints.
JD: Yep. It’s a breadcrumb trail and you don't know where it goes. If no one's laying down the breadcrumbs, then there's no trail to follow.
Michael Lewis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include “Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt,” “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game,” “Liar’s Poker” and “The Fifth Risk.” He also has a podcast called “Against the Rules.”