ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2023
Inferring the differences in incubation-period and generation-interval distributions of the Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 34 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
34 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Consolidating Estimates of the Incubation Period for Omicron Subvariants From the Literature and Their Comparison to the Estimate From Taiwan: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, September 2024.Influenza and other respiratory viruses · 2025Pooled it
- Assessing changes in incubation period, serial interval, and generation time of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern: a systematic review and meta-analysis.BMC medicine · 2023Pooled it
- Real-time estimation of pathogen transmission dynamics from wastewater.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Network structure induced bias in estimates of intrinsic generation times.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Estimating the generation time for SARS-CoV-2 transmission using United States household data, December 2021-May 2023.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Cost-Effective Sampling Strategies for Wastewater Surveillance: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.Environmental science & technology · 2026Article
- Geographical Variation in SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Potential in Massachusetts.Epidemiologia (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Evaluation and estimation of epidemic trajectories for SARS-CoV-2 from clinical and wastewater data in Gauteng Province, South Africa.PLOS global public health · 2026Article
- Review
- Effects of individual variation and seasonal vaccination on disease risks.Nature communications · 2025Article
- COVID-19 Transmission Potential and Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions in Maine During the COVID-19 Pandemic.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Quantifying viral pandemic potential from experimental transmission studies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A comparative analysis of the role of containment policies, vaccination strategies and virus variants in the COVID-19 pandemic across nine European countries.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Molecular characterization and evolutionary analysis of human adenovirus type 55, related to febrile respiratory illness in the South Korean military.Virus genes · 2025Article
- Estimating cumulative infection rate of COVID-19 after adjusting the dynamic zero-COVID policy in China.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2025Article
- Article
- Heightened Innate Immune and Inflammatory Gene Expression in the Skin of Severe COVID-19 Cases.Journal of inflammation research · 2025Article
- Epidemiological impact of revoking mask-wearing recommendation on COVID-19 transmission in Tokyo, Japan.Infectious Disease Modelling · 2024Article
- Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 epidemics in pediatric population in Liguria (North-west Italy) from March 2020 to December 2022: what could we have learned?Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene · 2024Article
- Detection of Double-Stranded RNA Intermediates During SARS-CoV-2 Infections of Syrian Golden Hamsters with Monoclonal Antibodies and Its Implications for Histopathological Evaluation of In Vivo Studies.International journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Estimating the differences in the incubation-period, serial-interval, and generation-interval distributions of SARS-CoV-2 variants is critical to understanding their transmission. However, the impact of epidemic dynamics is often neglected in estimating the timing of infection-for example, when an epidemic is growing exponentially, a cohort of infected individuals who developed symptoms at the same time are more likely to have been infected recently. Here, we reanalyze incubation-period and serial-interval data describing transmissions of the Delta and Omicron variants from the Netherlands at the end of December 2021. Previous analysis of the same dataset reported shorter mean observed incubation period (3.2 d vs. 4.4 d) and serial interval (3.5 d vs. 4.1 d) for the Omicron variant, but the number of infections caused by the Delta variant decreased during this period as the number of Omicron infections increased. When we account for growth-rate differences of two variants during the study period, we estimate similar mean incubation periods (3.8 to 4.5 d) for both variants but a shorter mean generation interval for the Omicron variant (3.0 d; 95% CI: 2.7 to 3.2 d) than for the Delta variant (3.8 d; 95% CI: 3.7 to 4.0 d). The differences in estimated generation intervals may be driven by the "network effect"-higher effective transmissibility of the Omicron variant can cause faster susceptible depletion among contact networks, which in turn prevents late transmission (therefore shortening realized generation intervals). Using up-to-date generation-interval distributions is critical to accurately estimating the reproduction advantage of the Omicron variant.
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