What was Pangolin's efficacy heavily reliant upon for maintenance?
Community-driven effort sharing new genetic sequences
The effectiveness and accuracy of the Pangolin system were intrinsically linked to the collaborative nature of the scientific community during the pandemic. Pangolin functioned as a classification engine, but its analytical capability depended entirely on the data it received. Scientists worldwide had to actively share newly sequenced genetic samples, which were then processed by the software to assign lineages. This collaborative model required volunteer contributors to keep the sequence database continuously updated. Without this steady stream of new input data supplied by the community, the tool's ability to accurately contextualize new strains would have quickly degraded, illustrating the inseparable link between the tool and the human element providing the source material.
