Impact of a New SARS-CoV-2 Variant on the Population: A Mathematical Modeling Approach

  1. Gilberto Gonzalez-Parra
  2. David Martínez-Rodríguez
  3. Rafael Villanueva-Micó

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Abstract

Several SARS-CoV-2 variants have emerged around the world, and the appearance of other variants depends on many factors. These new variants might have different characteristics that can affect the transmissibility and death rate. The administration of vaccines against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in early December of 2020 and in some countries the vaccines will not soon be widely available. For this article, we studied the impact of a new more transmissible SARS-CoV-2 strain on prevalence, hospitalizations, and deaths related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We studied different scenarios regarding the transmissibility in order to provide a scientific support for public health policies and bring awareness of potential future situations related to the COVID-19 pandemic. We constructed a compartmental mathematical model based on differential equations to study these different scenarios. In this way, we are able to understand how a new, more infectious strain of the virus can impact the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic. We studied several metrics related to the possible outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to assess the impact of a higher transmissibility of a new SARS-CoV-2 strain on these metrics. We found that, even if the new variant has the same death rate, its high transmissibility can increase the number of infected people, those hospitalized, and deaths. The simulation results show that health institutions need to focus on increasing non-pharmaceutical interventions and the pace of vaccine inoculation since a new variant with higher transmissibility, such as, for example, VOC-202012/01 of lineage B.1.1.7, may cause more devastating outcomes in the population.

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  1. Version published to 10.3390/mca26020025
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.24.21252406: (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

    No key resources detected.

    Results 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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Despite the limitations of this type of mathematical model, they have been useful in many epidemics and are a classical method to deal with epidemics [47, 15, 20, 38, 26, 9, 27, 68, 8]. Some particular limitations of this type of study are the assumption of homogeneous mixing, exponential transition times, and time-invariant parameters. Additionally, the behavior of individuals is averaged in order to avoid more complex models that in turn have their own limitations. For instance, individual agent based models have many parameters and in several cases the values of these parameters are difficult to obtain and identifiability issues usually are generated [109, 116, 39]. Despite the classical limitations of our type of model, we found valuable qualitative results that are still valid under changes of some parameters and initial conditions. These qualitative results bring awareness of the potentially dangerous situation that could arise in several countries if a new more transmissible variant such the VOC-202012/01 of lineage B.1.1.7. is introduced in the population. It has been found that the new variant VOC-202012/01 of lineage B.1.1.7. is more transmissible [93, 75, 140, 19]. Furthermore, some researchers have predicted that this new variant will likely become the dominant variant in many U.S. states by March, 2021, leading to further surges of COVID-19 in the country, unless urgent mitigation efforts are immediately implemented [140]. The results presented here agree with th...

    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.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.02.24.21252406v1 on medRxiv