ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2022
The importance of the generation interval in investigating dynamics and control of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Daily profile of COVID-19 infections in Europe - a biophysical perspective.Biophysical reviews · 2025Review
- Understanding pandemics through molecular gas dynamics.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Modeling and Characterizing the Growth of the Texas-New Mexico Measles Outbreak of 2025.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- A modular approach to forecasting COVID-19 hospital bed occupancy.Communications medicine · 2025Article
- Concepts and Methods for Predicting Viral Evolution.Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2025Article
- Concepts and methods for predicting viral evolution.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Early mutational signatures and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 Gamma and Lambda variants in Chile.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The impact of quality-adjusted life years on evaluating COVID-19 mitigation strategies: lessons from age-specific vaccination roll-out and variants of concern in Belgium (2020-2022).BMC public health · 2024Article
- Article
- Fitness, growth and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 genetic variants.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Inferring the differences in incubation-period and generation-interval distributions of the Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Epidemic modeling with heterogeneity and social diffusion.Journal of mathematical biology · 2023Article
- Improved time-varying reproduction numbers using the generation interval for COVID-19.Frontiers in public health · 2023Article
- Correlation between times to SARS-CoV-2 symptom onset and secondary transmission undermines epidemic control efforts.Epidemics · 2022Article
- The importance of the generation interval in investigating dynamics and control of new SARS-CoV-2 variants.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Global estimates of the fitness advantage of SARS-CoV-2 variant Omicron.Virus evolution · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Inferring the relative strength (i.e. the ratio of reproduction numbers) and relative speed (i.e. the difference between growth rates) of new SARS-CoV-2 variants is critical to predicting and controlling the course of the current pandemic. Analyses of new variants have primarily focused on characterizing changes in the proportion of new variants, implicitly or explicitly assuming that the relative speed remains fixed over the course of an invasion. We use a generation-interval-based framework to challenge this assumption and illustrate how relative strength and speed change over time under two idealized interventions: a constant-strength intervention like idealized vaccination or social distancing, which reduces transmission rates by a constant proportion, and a constant-speed intervention like idealized contact tracing, which isolates infected individuals at a constant rate. In general, constant-strength interventions change the relative speed of a new variant, while constant-speed interventions change its relative strength. Differences in the generation-interval distributions between variants can exaggerate these changes and modify the effectiveness of interventions. Finally, neglecting differences in generation-interval distributions can bias estimates of relative strength.
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