Not every nation does this, mostly only the ones with socialized medicine are.
For nations like the US, we are measuring the variant by looking at sewage. It doesn't tell us anything about who ends up hospitalized, but it does give us a good indication of what the is the common variant in a community (and inferences are drawn from there).
The UK has been doing probably the most covid genome sequencing of any nation.
Thanks, good to know. Would be interesting if the UK also measured variants via sewage, as a methodological comparison against their more expensive individual sequencing.
For nations like the US, we are measuring the variant by looking at sewage. It doesn't tell us anything about who ends up hospitalized, but it does give us a good indication of what the is the common variant in a community (and inferences are drawn from there).
The UK has been doing probably the most covid genome sequencing of any nation.