As Sun Tzu famously said: ‘know your enemy’, or more correctly: ‘If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.’ This is true not only for human conflict but in what is probably the greatest and longest running battle the human race has ever engaged in: that between humans and their pathogens. Ultimately, COVID-19, our current enemy of focus, might kill 1%, but hopefully, many fewer now that there is a vaccine and better treatments

COVID-19 is not the pandemic I was predicting. Year after year, for just over 10 years a new class of about 150 young, smart medical students would come to my lectures on medical bacteriology and infection at Oxford. I would explain what things contribute to virulence (what makes pathogens dangerous); most years I would get them to play an online game in which a pandemic was simulated and from which they would learn some key things, with a prize for the person who could take

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