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Every now and again, there is a strong reminder that we're living in the future. This is one of them.

A scientific result like this was promised to us as a someday-goal of early sequencing technologies when I was a child.

A lot of people have worked really hard to make this happen, and it is a human triumph, even if there is more to do.

Yes, it's completely and exceptionally awesome that we can just sign on the Internet and gain this genome sequence. But it's also important to weigh the value. As the article states:

> but there is insufficient epidemiological information for it to be useful here

It looks to me like that quote is talking about one particular sequence that they've left out of their list (it's explaining why they did that), not about the 13 sequences that they have listed.

Ah, ok. Thank you for pointing that out

So the authors are using that in a particular manner that might be missed by the general HN audience.

By "insufficient epidemiological information", they mean that the genome cannot, itself, be used to assemble a transmission tree, which is sort of the brass ring of sequence data.

That is not to say that the genome data isn't useful for epidemiology.

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