scholarly journals Estimating the transmission advantage of the D614G mutant strain of SARS-CoV-2, December 2019 to June 2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (49) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathy Leung ◽  
Yao Pei ◽  
Gabriel M Leung ◽  
Tommy TY Lam ◽  
Joseph T Wu

Introduction The SARS-CoV-2 lineages carrying the amino acid change D614G have become the dominant variants in the global COVID-19 pandemic. By June 2021, all the emerging variants of concern carried the D614G mutation. The rapid spread of the G614 mutant suggests that it may have a transmission advantage over the D614 wildtype. Aim Our objective was to estimate the transmission advantage of D614G by integrating phylogenetic and epidemiological analysis. Methods We assume that the mutation D614G was the only site of interest which characterised the two cocirculating virus strains by June 2020, but their differential transmissibility might be attributable to a combination of D614G and other mutations. We define the fitness of G614 as the ratio of the basic reproduction number of the strain with G614 to the strain with D614 and applied an epidemiological framework for fitness inference to analyse SARS-CoV-2 surveillance and sequence data. Results Using this framework, we estimated that the G614 mutant is 31% (95% credible interval: 28–34) more transmissible than the D614 wildtype. Therefore, interventions that were previously effective in containing or mitigating the D614 wildtype (e.g. in China, Vietnam and Thailand) may be less effective against the G614 mutant. Conclusion Our framework can be readily integrated into current SARS-CoV-2 surveillance to monitor the emergence and fitness of mutant strains such that pandemic surveillance, disease control and development of treatment and vaccines can be adjusted dynamically.

Author(s):  
Kathy Leung ◽  
Yao Pei ◽  
Gabriel M Leung ◽  
Tommy T. Y. Lam ◽  
Joseph T. Wu

The SARS-CoV-2 lineage carrying the amino acid change D614G has become the dominant variant in the global COVID-19 pandemic. The rapid spread of the G614 mutant suggests that it may have a transmission advantage over the D614 wildtype. Using our previous epidemiological framework to analyze COVID-19 surveillance and sequence data, we estimated that the G614 mutant is 31% (28-34%) more transmissible than the D614 wildtype. As such, interventions that were previously effective in containing or mitigating the D614 wildtype (e.g. in China, Vietnam, Thailand, etc.) might be less effective against the G614 mutant. Our framework can be readily integrated into current COVID-19 surveillance to monitor the emergence and fitness of mutant strains, such that pandemic surveillance, disease control and development of treatment and vaccines can be adjusted dynamically.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dipo Aldila ◽  
Brenda M. Samiadji ◽  
Gracia M. Simorangkir ◽  
Sarbaz H. A. Khosnaw ◽  
Muhammad Shahzad

Abstract Objective Several essential factors have played a crucial role in the spreading mechanism of COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) in the human population. These factors include undetected cases, asymptomatic cases, and several non-pharmaceutical interventions. Because of the rapid spread of COVID-19 worldwide, understanding the significance of these factors is crucial in determining whether COVID-19 will be eradicated or persist in the population. Hence, in this study, we establish a new mathematical model to predict the spread of COVID-19 considering mentioned factors. Results Infection detection and vaccination have the potential to eradicate COVID-19 from Jakarta. From the sensitivity analysis, we find that rapid testing is crucial in reducing the basic reproduction number when COVID-19 is endemic in the population rather than contact trace. Furthermore, our results indicate that a vaccination strategy has the potential to relax social distancing rules, while maintaining the basic reproduction number at the minimum possible, and also eradicate COVID-19 from the population with a higher vaccination rate. In conclusion, our model proposed a mathematical model that can be used by Jakarta’s government to relax social distancing policy by relying on future COVID-19 vaccine potential.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dasom Kim ◽  
Jisoo Jo ◽  
Jun-Sik Lim ◽  
Sukhyun Ryu

South Korea is experiencing the community transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (B.1.1.529). We estimated that the mean of the serial interval was 2.22 days, and the basic reproduction number was 1.90 (95% Credible Interval, 1.50-2.43) for the Omicron variant outbreak in South Korea.


Author(s):  
Erik M Volz ◽  
Han Fu ◽  
Haowei Wang ◽  
Xiaoyue Xi ◽  
Wei Chen ◽  
...  

AbstractAnalysis of genetic sequence data from the pandemic SARS Coronavirus 2 can provide insights into epidemic origins, worldwide dispersal, and epidemiological history. With few exceptions, genomic epidemiological analysis has focused on geographically distributed data sets with few isolates in any given location. Here we report an analysis of 20 whole SARS-CoV 2 genomes from a single relatively small and geographically constrained outbreak in Weifang, People’s Republic of China. Using Bayesian model-based phylodynamic methods, we estimate the reproduction number for the outbreak to be 2.6 (95% CI:1.5-5). We further estimate the number of infections through time and compare these estimates to confirmed diagnoses by the Weifang Centers for Disease Control. We find that these estimates are consistent with reported cases and there is unlikely to be a large undiagnosed burden of infection over the period we studied.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (52) ◽  
pp. 1537-1544 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michiel van Boven ◽  
Mirjam Kretzschmar ◽  
Jacco Wallinga ◽  
Philip D O'Neill ◽  
Ole Wichmann ◽  
...  

Measles is a highly infectious disease that has been targeted for elimination from four WHO regions. Whether and under which conditions this goal is feasible is, however, uncertain since outbreaks have been documented in populations with high vaccination coverage (more than 90%). Here, we use the example of a large outbreak in a German public school to show how estimates of key epidemiological parameters such as the basic reproduction number ( R 0 ), vaccine efficacy (VE S ) and critical vaccination coverage ( p c ) can be obtained from partially observed outbreaks in highly vaccinated populations. Our analyses rely on Bayesian methods of inference based on the final size distribution of outbreak size, and use data which are easily collected. For the German public school the analyses indicate that the basic reproduction number of measles is higher than previously thought ( , 95% credible interval: 23.6–40.4), that the vaccine is highly effective in preventing infection ( , 95% credible interval: 0.993–0.999), and that a vaccination coverage in excess of 95 per cent may be necessary to achieve herd immunity ( , 95% credible interval: 0.961–0.978). We discuss the implications for measles elimination from highly vaccinated populations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Affan Alim ◽  
Abdul Rafay ◽  
Imran Naseem

Background: Proteins contribute significantly in every task of cellular life. Their functions encompass the building and repairing of tissues in human bodies and other organisms. Hence they are the building blocks of bones, muscles, cartilage, skin, and blood. Similarly, antifreeze proteins are of prime significance for organisms that live in very cold areas. With the help of these proteins, the cold water organisms can survive below zero temperature and resist the water crystallization process which may cause the rupture in the internal cells and tissues. AFP’s have attracted attention and interest in food industries and cryopreservation. Objective: With the increase in the availability of genomic sequence data of protein, an automated and sophisticated tool for AFP recognition and identification is in dire need. The sequence and structures of AFP are highly distinct, therefore, most of the proposed methods fail to show promising results on different structures. A consolidated method is proposed to produce the competitive performance on highly distinct AFP structure. Methods: In this study, we propose to use machine learning-based algorithms Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by Gradient Boosting (GB) for antifreeze protein identification. To analyze the performance and validation of the proposed model, various combinations of two segments composition of amino acid and dipeptide are used. PCA, in particular, is proposed to dimension reduction and high variance retaining of data which is followed by an ensemble method named gradient boosting for modelling and classification. Results: The proposed method obtained the superfluous performance on PDB, Pfam and Uniprot dataset as compared with the RAFP-Pred method. In experiment-3, by utilizing only 150 PCA components a high accuracy of 89.63 was achieved which is superior to the 87.41 utilizing 300 significant features reported for the RAFP-Pred method. Experiment-2 is conducted using two different dataset such that non-AFP from the PISCES server and AFPs from Protein data bank. In this experiment-2, our proposed method attained high sensitivity of 79.16 which is 12.50 better than state-of-the-art the RAFP-pred method. Conclusion: AFPs have a common function with distinct structure. Therefore, the development of a single model for different sequences often fails to AFPs. A robust results have been shown by our proposed model on the diversity of training and testing dataset. The results of the proposed model outperformed compared to the previous AFPs prediction method such as RAFP-Pred. Our model consists of PCA for dimension reduction followed by gradient boosting for classification. Due to simplicity, scalability properties and high performance result our model can be easily extended for analyzing the proteomic and genomic dataset.


Author(s):  
Xiaoming Fan ◽  
Zhigang Wang

AbstractAn SEIR epidemic model with constant immigration and random fluctuation around the endemic equilibrium is considered. As a special case, a deterministic system discussed by Li et al. will be incorporated into the stochastic version given by us. We carry out a detailed analysis on the asymptotic behavior of the stochastic model, also regarding of the basic reproduction number ℛ


J ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-100
Author(s):  
Nita H. Shah ◽  
Ankush H. Suthar ◽  
Ekta N. Jayswal ◽  
Ankit Sikarwar

In this article, a time-dependent susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model is constructed to investigate the transmission rate of COVID-19 in various regions of India. The model included the fundamental parameters on which the transmission rate of the infection is dependent, like the population density, contact rate, recovery rate, and intensity of the infection in the respective region. Looking at the great diversity in different geographic locations in India, we determined to calculate the basic reproduction number for all Indian districts based on the COVID-19 data till 7 July 2020. By preparing district-wise spatial distribution maps with the help of ArcGIS 10.2, the model was employed to show the effect of complete lockdown on the transmission rate of the COVID-19 infection in Indian districts. Moreover, with the model's transformation to the fractional ordered dynamical system, we found that the nature of the proposed SIR model is different for the different order of the systems. The sensitivity analysis of the basic reproduction number is done graphically which forecasts the change in the transmission rate of COVID-19 infection with change in different parameters. In the numerical simulation section, oscillations and variations in the model compartments are shown for two different situations, with and without lockdown.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document