Andrew McArthur and his graduate students were in the middle of designing a new type of lab test that could have detected any known respiratory virus on the planet - and then SARS-CoV-2, better known as COVID-19 hit.

McArthur is an associate professor of biochemistry and biomedical science at McMaster University in Hamilton, ON, and was working together alongside researchers including teams from Ontario’s Vector Institute and Sunnybrook Health Sciences in Toronto. As the pandemic hit, McArthur and his team of computational biology researchers rapidly adjusted to focus on COVID-19. They joined a team led by Bo Wang at the Vector Institute in building a new app as the front end of a sophisticated compute-intensive system that now benefits from a Cisco donation of UCS systems to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

There are multiple ways to track the spread of a virus including contact tracing, where all the individuals that an infected person has been in contact with are tracked.

"Traditional contact tracing is extremely useful as it gives a sense of what's going on," said McArthur, a member of McMaster’s Infectious disease research institute. "What you don't know is the exact transmission dynamics."

The other way to track virus spread is with molecular epidemiology, where the genome sequence of a pathogen is used to track how the virus moves around, from one location to another. The molecular epidemiology approach is also important as it tracks how the virus is evolving, which is critical to researchers developing a vaccine for COVID-19.

Tracking molecular epidemiology is what McArthur does as co-lead of the Province of Ontario's genomic surveillance of COVID-19. His team is also working with the Public Health Agency of Canada to set the standards on how viruses are analyzed and how accurate data flows from local health authorities up to the national level.