CHARLOTTE, N.C. — William Taylor has been busy these last couple of weeks.

What You Need To Know

UNC Charlotte's Bioinformatics and Genomics lab was mostly seeing the delta variant in COVID-19 samples over these last few months

This week, the lab is testing samples from those who just returned from traveling during Thanksgiving, looking for omicron

Professor Dr. Cynthia Gibas believes if the variant is found in Mecklenburg County it could lead to a potential spike in more COVID-19 cases

Taylor was hired on as a sequence technician inside UNC Charlotte’s Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics lab last month. 

“This was just a great opportunity to use my molecular biology techniques to help in assessing the COVID trends," he said. 

Taylor spent years doing bioterrorism and forensics for the government, but now he’s handling a new threat — the omicron variant. 

"Now we’re looking for omicron," Dr. Cynthia Gibas said. "We don’t know if we have it in the area yet." 

Gibas says their workload has increased as they work to see if the omicron variant is in Mecklenburg County. 

“It went from 'oh yeah, let’s do more delta' to 'oh wow, we’ve got something to look for now' within the space of a day," she said. 

Taylor is now testing more COVID-19 samples, particularly ones from those who traveled during Thanksgiving. 

Right now, the omicron variant hasn’t been confirmed in North Carolina, but Taylor and others in this lab will continue to test samples and provide the county's health department with information that can help us navigate through this pandemic. 

Gibas says they will find out the results from those samples in the next few days. 

She says if the omicron variant is found in Mecklenburg County she anticipates our area could see a spike in cases, particularly of those unvaccinated.