Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 16, Issue 7, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0255438
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Funding
- Sao Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) [2019/13341-7, 2019/20271-5, 2016/01343-7]
- Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq) [301082/2019-7]
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The study developed an individual-based network model to analyze genetic evolution of viruses in epidemic spreading. Results suggest that lower community connectivity, such as between cities, increases the probability of reinfection.
Although traditional models of epidemic spreading focus on the number of infected, susceptible and recovered individuals, a lot of attention has been devoted to integrate epidemic models with population genetics. Here we develop an individual-based model for epidemic spreading on networks in which viruses are explicitly represented by finite chains of nucleotides that can mutate inside the host. Under the hypothesis of neutral evolution we compute analytically the average pairwise genetic distance between all infecting viruses over time. We also derive a mean-field version of this equation that can be added directly to compartmental models such as SIR or SEIR to estimate the genetic evolution. We compare our results with the inferred genetic evolution of SARS-CoV-2 at the beginning of the epidemic in China and found good agreement with the analytical solution of our model. Finally, using genetic distance as a proxy for different strains, we use numerical simulations to show that the lower the connectivity between communities, e.g., cities, the higher the probability of reinfection.
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