Two laboratories in Britain and South Africa, which were at the forefront of tracking new coronavirus variants during the pandemic, have teamed up to keep the focus on genomic surveillance globally as the COVID-19 emergency recedes.
The teams said they were worried governments and funders may pull back from such surveillance, despite its potential to better monitor many infectious diseases, from malaria to cholera.
"One of the big benefits that came from the pandemic was this huge global investment in infrastructure," said John Sillitoe, director of the Genomic Surveillance Unit (GSU) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, one of the two partners.