On Feb. 5, 2021, the Wellcome Sanger Institute announced that to date it had sequenced 136,383 coronavirus genomes. The whole of the UK had sequenced 250,673. All were freely available for analysis via COG-UK, ENA and GISAID. Across the globe, there were a total of 489,340 sequences available for public analysis.

As the sequencing hub of the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK), the Sanger Institute was sequencing the genomes of coronavirus samples from across the country.