The COVID-19 pandemics and the relevance of biosafety facilities for metagenomics surveillance, structured disease prevention and control

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic represents an enormous challenge to all countries, regardless of their development status. The manipulation of its etiologic agent SARS-CoV-2 requires a biosafety containment level 3 laboratories (BSL-3) to understand virus biology and in vivo pathogenesis as well as the translation of new knowledge into the preclinical development of vaccines and antivirals. As such, BSL-3 facilities should be considered an integral part of any public health response to emerging infectious disease prevention, control and management. Differently from BSL-2, BSL-3 units vary considerably along the range from industrialized to the least developed countries. Innovative Developing Countries (IDCs) such as Brazil, which excelled at controlling the 2015-2017 Zika epidemic, had to face a serious flaw in its disease control and prevention structure: the scarcity and uneven geographic distribution of its BSL-3 facilities, including those for preclinical animal experimentation.