Time-dependent heterogeneity leads to transient suppression of the COVID-19 epidemic, not herd immunity.

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

SUBMITTER: Tkachenko AV 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8092384 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature