Mutation induced infection waves in diseases like COVID-19
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
After more than 6 million deaths worldwide, the ongoing vaccination to conquer the COVID-19 disease is now competing with the emergence of increasingly contagious mutations, repeatedly supplanting earlier strains. Following the near-absence of historical examples of the long-time evolution of infectious diseases under similar circumstances, models are crucial to exemplify possible scenarios. Accordingly, in the present work we systematically generalize the popular susceptible-infected-recovered model to account for mutations leading to repeatedly occurring new strains, which we coarse grain based on tools from statistical mechanics to derive a model predicting the most likely outcomes. The model predicts that mutations can induce a super-exponential growth of infection numbers at early times, which self-amplify to giant infection waves which are caused by a positive feedback loop between infection numbers and mutations and lead to a simultaneous infection of the majority of the population. At later stages—if vaccination progresses too slowly—mutations can interrupt an ongoing decrease of infection numbers and can cause infection revivals which occur as single waves or even as whole wave trains featuring alternative periods of decreasing and increasing infection numbers. This panorama of possible mutation-induced scenarios should be tested in more detailed models to explore their concrete significance for specific infectious diseases. Further, our results might be useful for discussions regarding the importance of a release of vaccine-patents to reduce the risk of mutation-induced infection revivals but also to coordinate the release of measures following a downwards trend of infection numbers.
Article activity feed
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.06.21260067: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Experimental Models: Organisms/Strains Sentences Resources Basic reproduction number of COVID-19 mutants: The basic reproduction numbers where extracted from: original variant [46], B.1.1.7 [11], B.1.351 [47], and P.1 [13]. B.1.1.7suggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.07.06.21260067: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
Experimental Models: Organisms/Strains Sentences Resources Basic reproduction number of COVID-19 mutants: The basic reproduction numbers where extracted from: original variant [46], B.1.1.7 [11], B.1.351 [47], and P.1 [13]. B.1.1.7suggested: NoneResults from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-
