Life is full of initially hidden and unintended impacts and consequences; for something as huge and pervasive as COVID, no doubt they will be many and varied: some good, some bad, some just resulting in different. The global infrastructural leadership of the UK in the area of genomics, underpinned by the public and charitable contributions of the UK Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust, has been critical in surveillance, variant detection, and now screening. By February 2

Sequence Typing (ST) is a widely established and used methodology. It is most certainly better than its predecessors from the era before affordable and accessible DNA sequencing, and its development and implementation was an enormous step forward for pathogen identification and the study of bacterial population genetics. In its original form, MLST, it was very much a DNA-based version of its protein-based predecessor, only better in every meaningful way. The conceptual predec