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SCAN accounted for as much as a quarter of all testing in King County, and its maps helped local officials understand where the disease was most prevalent. Then, in May, the federal government suddenly ordered them to stop. The team had run up against another problem: whether they were allowed to test samples that people had collected on their own (rather than by a health care worker). Up to that point, the federal government's rules regarding who could test self-collected samples had been murky. When they did clarify the rules, it was bad news for SCAN: They needed federal approval for their test. The team immediately started scrambling to find another way forward. Then, two weeks later, the FDA changed its policy again. Researchers could test samples gathered by participants as long as they had approval from the review board overseeing the work. SCAN got the okay from theirs, and on June 10, the program took up testing again. Over the rest of that year, the team toted up several accomplishments. They processed almost 46,000 COVID tests, nearly all of them from people who had enrolled online from home (as opposed to the kiosks in public places, which had largely shut down). They sequenced nearly 4,000 COVID genomes, more than half of all the sequences in Washington state that year, and they advised teams who were setting up similar studies in Boston and the San Francisco Bay Area. As I write this toward the end of 2021, SCAN is still running, and the Seattle Flu Study continues to gather data on influenza and two dozen other pathogens. Trevor Bedford, the researcher who had discovered the genetic similarities between the two COVID samples and figured out their importance, is widely recognized for his groundbreaking contributions to COVID science. His genomic family trees are used throughout the world, and he has become an