Getting bored waiting for your DNA to appear? Read the news blurbs at the top of the screen. Many of them are absolutely hilarious, and some of them are great satire of actual current events that are happening today. Eventually, they stop appearing, but they won’t stop until well after you have built up a good amount of DNA. With more updates to the game, more of them will appear as well.
An alternative use for your resistance pathogens is to not buy any of them until the cure rate hits at least 50 percent. The reasoning for this is that many of them, such as gene obfuscation (or generally, any of the ones on the right side of the store screen) will decrease the cure percentage. Others, mainly the ones on the left side of the store screen, will simply make the cure percentage increase more slowly.
If you want to set your phone down and you’re pretty confident that no news popups will occur, set the lock screen settings on your phone so that they never lock automatically. Then set the phone down and time in the game will pass indefinitely until either you pick the phone back up and begin playing again or until a news popup stops the game.
Get a preview on where you will have to tap next by paying attention to the red and blue ships and places. When a red one hits a new country, it’s about to infect that country and a red DNA will pop up. When a blue one is on the way to a country, a blue cure bubble will pop up when it lands.
You don’t have to wait til every single person in every single country is infected to start buying symptoms. Just make sure that at least one person in every country is infected. Usually, the last country to be infected will either be Madagascar, Greenland or Sweden, so make these the ones that you watch out for before you start purchasing symptoms.