One of the things we did during the pandemic was significantly scale up or ability to sequence genomes. We were literally watching the virus evolve near real-time because a large chunk of samples could be sequenced and processed.

While they’re are obviously data privacy concerns, for which the UK has a fairly long history of legislating for, having a full sequence for every newborn could allow for all sorts of cheaper early interventions. I’m sure the dataset would also be very useful for researchers as well.