There are so many good people in the world, especially those involved in trying to help the world get past the pandemic of COVID19. This week BBC News Wales did a feature story about some of the good people who hunt down variants of the deadly Coronavirus 19 so they can learn the genetic code of the virus, and Wales leads the way in that research. This week's Good people are from the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff: Jess Hey, a research scientist and Prof Tom Connor, PenGU's bio-informatic lead. Here's an excerpt of their story
Meet Wales' virus variant hunters
By Owain Clarke
BBC Wales health correspondent
Meet Jess Hey, a Public Health Wales scientist who is working on hunting down new variants of Covid-19.
She is part of a team of 16, based in Cardiff, that has been able to sequence between 15 to 20% of all positive cases in Wales since Covid arrived, one of the highest rates anywhere in the world.
Ms Hey, who only started three months ago, prepares samples selected at random from positive Covid tests across and helps to look for tiny differences between the samples in the virus's genetic code.
She said her work is "very different" from when she was a zoology student but "exciting".
A Covid variant, first spotted in Kent in the autumn, spread quickly and is now the dominant form across Wales and much of the UK.
As viruses copy themselves within cells, and go on to infect others, tiny errors can occur. Prof Tom Connor, PenGU's bio-informatics lead, said: "Viruses change all the time - like making photocopies of an ordinary original document. Since the start of the pandemic, the team has been able to read and decipher the entire genetic code of almost 30,000 Covid samples.
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