Reviewer 2.1

[Eabousam]

I suggest you use countries with much lower genomic surveillance effort as well, as while there are some differences between those countries they are all on higher end of effort. Meaning that the issues especially at the emergence of a new variant will be easier to miss.

It wasn’t clear why for Australia model’s performance was slightly different. Is it due to sampling efforts or it spurious? I suggest the authors explain this a little in more detail.

TODO:

• Create a notebook with a panel for each country, sequences per month for 12 months to identify countries to add with lower sequencing intensity (Table 1, S1A, S1B)
• Look for two nearby countries around 5,000 per month.
• Suggesting manuscript change added to explain what’s happening to Australia

[Eabousam]

Created supplementary figures and pushed, added countries Vietnam and Trinidad & Tobago