SEMINOLE COUNTY, Fla. — As Florida continues to see the nation’s highest levels of the UK variant of COVID-19, Central Florida health officials are using random-sampling because testing for the variants is expensive and time-consuming.

“Right now, the state lab is only selecting a few cases to send for the additional testing," Seminole County Emergency Manager Alan Harris said. "We decided in the county that on Thursdays at our community-based testing site, just to get a sampling, we would send all the positive results to go get the variant test.

That strategy is the way to go, until it’s determined variant testing can and should be done every day, Harris said.

Orange County is following a similar approach with random-sampling.

“It obviously costs money to do that, too, and there’s not a lot of money for variant testing," Harris said.

Right now, widespread variant testing isn’t only unrealistic, it’s unnecessary, according to Amesh Adalja, infectious disease physician and professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“Not every case is getting tested for the variant because it is very resource intensive, and you may not need to know whether every single case is a variant," Adalja said. "You have to have a general idea of the prevalence of the variant in a given community or a given population.”

The prevalence you see now doesn’t paint a clear picture, he said.

“The number of variants you see in a different state is likely a gross underrepresentation because we’re only sampling a certain percentage of positive tests to see that," Adalja said.

He said he does believe, though, that certain variants, like the B.1.1.7 UK variant, will eventually become the dominant strain of COVID-19.

Seminole County will also be send positive cases from Thursday’s community-based testing site to the state lab for variant testing.

They’re still awaiting results from last Thursday’s sampling.