ReviewProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Time-dependent heterogeneity leads to transient suppression of the COVID-19 epidemic, not herd immunity.
Review in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Heterogeneity in and correlation between host transmissibility and susceptibility can greatly impact epidemic dynamics.Journal of theoretical biology · 2025Pooled it
- High seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2 infection in South America, but still not enough for herd immunity!International journal of infectious diseases : IJID : official publication of the International Society for Infectious Diseases · 2021Pooled it
- Mechanics of pandemics.EClinicalMedicine · 2026Review
- AI-driven big data analysis and predictive modeling of infectious disease immunity: from correlates to causal, multiscale understanding.Archives of microbiology · 2026Review
- Capturing the spatiotemporal spread of COVID-19 in 30 European countries during 2020 - 2022.BMC public health · 2025Article
- Heterogeneity in and correlation between host transmissibility and susceptibility can greatly impact epidemic dynamics.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2025Article
- Amplification of the power of network hubs and degree skewness over infectious disease spread during lulls.PloS one · 2025Article
- Prior exposure to pathogens augments host heterogeneity in susceptibility and has key epidemiological consequences.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Prior exposure to pathogens augments host heterogeneity in susceptibility and has key epidemiological consequences.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Interacting particle models on the impact of spatially heterogeneous human behavioral factors on dynamics of infectious diseases.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Emergence of the reproduction matrix in epidemic forecasting.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2024Article
- High seroprevalence of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 among healthcare workers in Yaoundé, Cameroon after the first wave of Covid-19 pandemic and associated factors.Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2024Article
- Heterogeneous risk tolerance, in-groups, and epidemic waves.Frontiers in applied mathematics and statistics · 2024Article
- Analysis of the impact of COVID-19 variants and vaccination on the time-varying reproduction number: statistical methods.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- The counterintuitive implications of superspreading diseases.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Population-Level Immunity for Transient Suppression of COVID-19 Waves in Japan from April 2021 to September 2022.Vaccines · 2023Article
- COVID-19 epidemic peaks distribution in the United-States of America, from epidemiological modeling to public health policies.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Reproductive variance can drive behavioral dynamics.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Host age structure reshapes parasite symbiosis: collaboration begets pathogens, competition begets virulent mutualists.Biology direct · 2022Article
- Statistical inference using GLEaM model with spatial heterogeneity and correlation between regions.Scientific reports · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Epidemics generally spread through a succession of waves that reflect factors on multiple timescales. On short timescales, superspreading events lead to burstiness and overdispersion, whereas long-term persistent heterogeneity in susceptibility is expected to lead to a reduction in both the infection peak and the herd immunity threshold (HIT). Here, we develop a general approach to encompass both timescales, including time variations in individual social activity, and demonstrate how to incorporate them phenomenologically into a wide class of epidemiological models through reparameterization. We derive a nonlinear dependence of the effective reproduction number [Formula: see text] on the susceptible population fraction S. We show that a state of transient collective immunity (TCI) emerges well below the HIT during early, high-paced stages of the epidemic. However, this is a fragile state that wanes over time due to changing levels of social activity, and so the infection peak is not an indication of long-lasting herd immunity: Subsequent waves may emerge due to behavioral changes in the population, driven by, for example, seasonal factors. Transient and long-term levels of heterogeneity are estimated using empirical data from the COVID-19 epidemic and from real-life face-to-face contact networks. These results suggest that the hardest hit areas, such as New York City, have achieved TCI following the first wave of the epidemic, but likely remain below the long-term HIT. Thus, in contrast to some previous claims, these regions can still experience subsequent waves.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.