This looks like to me it's only used by the age/sex/hospitalized/died panels on covSpectrum which I've never used, and I think most people don't use it so the easiest fix would be to remove the panel that requires that data.
Also, the request seems to not be cached at all, so it slows every page load
On an 15MB network connection, the page load (world) is extremely slow.
Looking at network tab, there's an obvious culprit, a single 11MB request: https://lapis.cov-spectrum.org/gisaid/v2/sample/aggregated?host=Human&accessKey=9Cb3CqmrFnVjO3XCxQLO6gUnKPd&fields=division%2Cage%2Csex%2Chospitalized%2Cdied
This looks like to me it's only used by the age/sex/hospitalized/died panels on covSpectrum which I've never used, and I think most people don't use it so the easiest fix would be to remove the panel that requires that data.
Also, the request seems to not be cached at all, so it slows every page load