Importance of progressive transmissibility of emerging variants in sustaining the COVID-19 epidemic in England #

Ben Swallow

11:10 Monday in 2Q50/51.

Part of the How to be better prepared for a future pandemic: lessons learned from COVID-19, mpox and the four historic influenza pandemics session.

Abstract #

One of the evident properties of the COVID-19 pandemic was the genetic evolution of the dominant circulating variant(s). Genomic sequencing of community test samples has provided a novel and potentially highly-useful source of publicly-available data. This work studies the relative transmissibility of successive genetic (sub)variants of SARs-CoV-2, and the spatial patterns that drove transmission in England. We present results on estimates of the relative transmissibility of each of the emerging variants that dominated community circulation, from the Alpha wave of early 2021 through to Omicron subvariants BA.1 and BA.2. Associations with underlying demographic and environmental covariates are also studied to determine potential drivers of the different epidemiological waves.