Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of the role of genomic sequencing in tackling the covid-19 outbreak.

Public Health England (PHE) analyses COVID-19 genomic data together with epidemiological data to derive information on mutation, variants and transmission.

This analysis is fed into health protection activities such as local outbreak management, detection and characterisation of novel variants permitting more accurate predictions of the trajectory of the pandemic, output into policy including the border risk assessment and the roadmap tests and the vaccination programme. In addition, PHE’s data and analysis contribute to international control activities.