It's times like these that we come to depend heavily on basic science, that up until now few would have realized is really important. There's a long chain of publications cited in the top answer, that all represent years of person hours trying to discover these behaviors and then share them with the world.

Politicians sometimes ridicule basic research in an attempt to claim that government is irresponsible, and during recent elections it would have been a simple thing to ridicule the idea of studying "how many As are at the end of a viral genome" as an egregious waste of tax funds. Yet here we are.

Basic science without any known applications are how the really big discoveries come about. Sometimes we can guess that an area will be fruitful, but it's now always the case.

Next time somebody attempts to ridicule science as pointless, think back to why anybody might care about a strange pattern of nucleotides at the end of a virus.