A guest post by Dr Alexander Sundermann (bio below) in preparation for tomorrow’s Journal Club on genomic surveillance (register here for that)…

When was the last time you investigated a potential outbreak in your facility? How was it identified—or was it even confirmed as a true outbreak? For years, outbreak detection methods have remained relatively unchanged, relying heavily on observing infection patterns or confirming outbreaks reactively using whole genome sequencing (WGS). But what if we shifted this approach to perform WGS proactively on all infections? This idea is the foundation of our new pre-print study, which evaluates whether WGS surveillance can enable earlier outbreak detection and halt transmission before it spreads.