A very simple model to account for the rapid rise of the alpha variant of SARS-CoV-2 in several countries and the world
Resumen:
Since its first detection in the UK in September 2020, a highly contagious version of the coronavirus, the alpha or British variant a.k.a. B.1.1.7 SARS-CoV-2 virus lineage, rapidly spread across several countries and became the dominant strain in the outbreak. Here it is shown that a very simple evolutionary model can fit the observed change in frequency of B.1.1.7 for several countries, regions of countries and the whole world with a single parameter, its relative fitness f, which is almost universal f ≈ 1.5. This is consistent with a 50% higher ransmissibility than the local wild type and with the fact that the period in which this variant takes over has been in all the studied cases around 22 weeks.
| 2021 | |
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SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant |
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| Inglés | |
| Universidad de la República | |
| COLIBRI | |
| https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12008/33428 | |
| Acceso abierto | |
| Licencia Creative Commons Atribución - No Comercial - Sin Derivadas (CC - By-NC-ND 4.0) |
| Sumario: | Since its first detection in the UK in September 2020, a highly contagious version of the coronavirus, the alpha or British variant a.k.a. B.1.1.7 SARS-CoV-2 virus lineage, rapidly spread across several countries and became the dominant strain in the outbreak. Here it is shown that a very simple evolutionary model can fit the observed change in frequency of B.1.1.7 for several countries, regions of countries and the whole world with a single parameter, its relative fitness f, which is almost universal f ≈ 1.5. This is consistent with a 50% higher ransmissibility than the local wild type and with the fact that the period in which this variant takes over has been in all the studied cases around 22 weeks. |
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