Table 1.

Empirical country sequencing capacities at different income levels and lines of inquiry enabled at each level

Income class	Median weekly genomes (when sequencing at all)	Mean weekly genomes (when sequencing at all)	Probability of detecting a lineage at 5% prevalence under mean weekly sequencing regime	Maximum probable prevalence of an undetected lineage under mean weekly sequencing regime	Lines of inquiry available
Low income countries (LICs)	5	10.32	0.403	0.217	Presence/absence of prevalent lineages
Lower middle-income countries (LMCs)	10	88.92	0.988	0.028	+ Quantification of lineage prevalence with some error; identification of preliminary patterns of geographic spread
Upper middle-income countries (UMCs)	17	147.30	0.999	0.017
High-income countries (HICs)	98	1717.01	1.000	0.001	+ Investigations of lineage dynamics, and transmissibility; high precision lineage tracking (molecular evolution and geographic spread)

Countries at each income level have markedly different sequencing capacities, allowing for different degrees of epidemic resolution and lines of inquiry. Characteristics of each income class are shown in Supplementary Data 4.