Is the UK losing its world leading covid surveillance network just when it needs it most?

In early March 2020 a group of scientists set up the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK). The country had fewer than a hundred confirmed cases, and the idea of tracking pathogen variants in a pandemic was a minority interest pursued at a handful of UK academic departments.In less than a month COG-UK was producing the first of many published papers and regular updates to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE) and the four UK public health agencies. It showed early on that the novel coronavirus had been imported into the UK at least a thousand times in the first quarter of 2020, most frequently from Spain and France, with only a tiny fraction from China. By the end of the year COG-UK had described a “genomic cluster” of cases in Kent: the early signs of the first SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern, alpha.Within 18 months COG-UK had contributed one million…
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