HOUSTON – From the day the pandemic spread to the Greater Houston region, Houston Methodist has studied positive COVID-19 test results looking for mutations. “They are spreading rapidly.”Houston Methodist is one of the only entities that look for the variants, what Dr. Olsen calls “a very complicated, intense computational process” that requires a lot of time and staff. “We’ve done more than 20,000 sequences, which by far is more than any other state in the United States,” Dr. Olsen said. Ad“We expect viruses to mutate, it’s what they do,” Dr. Olsen said. The Houston Methodist lab processes 3-5,000 COVID-19 tests per day from all eight Methodist hospitals, plus any affiliated emergency centers and clinics.