A considerable effort has been devoted in all countries to react to the COVID-19 pandemic by tracing infected individuals, containing the spread of the disease, identifying therapies, and producing and distributing vaccines. Currently, a significant concern is the appearance of variants of the virus that may frustrate these efforts by showing increased transmissibility, increased disease severity, reduced response to therapy or vaccines, and ability to escape diagnosis. All countries have therefore devoted a massive attempt to the identification and tracking of these variants, which requires a vast technological effort to sequence a large number of viral genomes. In this paper, we report our experience as one of the Italian laboratories involved in SARS-CoV-2 variant tracing. We summarize the different approaches used, and outline a potential model combining several techniques to increase tracing ability while at the same time minimizing costs.

中文翻译：

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在实验室实践中识别 SARS-CoV-2 变异的不同策略

所有国家都付出了相当大的努力，通过追踪感染者、控制疾病传播、确定疗法以及生产和分发疫苗来应对 COVID-19 大流行。目前，一个重要的问题是病毒变体的出现可能会通过显示增加的传播性、增加的疾病严重性、降低对治疗或疫苗的反应以及逃避诊断的能力来挫败这些努力。因此，所有国家都投入了大量努力来识别和跟踪这些变异，这需要大量的技术努力来对大量病毒基因组进行测序。在本文中，我们报告了我们作为参与 SARS-CoV-2 变体追踪的意大利实验室之一的经验。我们总结了使用的不同方法，