As U.S. races to detect and track omicron, patchwork surveillance makes that tough

There's a lot we need to learn — and fast — about the omicron variant. Federal health officials have been scrambling since Thanksgiving to gather critical information to inform the U.S. response.

Key to that is ramping up the country's capacity to detect the variant in the U.S. population. Once it turns up — and experts are confident that's a matter of when not if — tracking its spread will be crucial.

"All of the key questions about the variant are really dependent on us being able to identify the variant here in the U.S. but also tracking how it's spreading and in whom," says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health.

But Jha and other experts are concerned that the U.S. capacity to detect and ultimately track the variant is limited by a few big issues that have plagued our pandemic