Epidemiological theory of virus variants.

Physica A

Institut de Physique des 2 Infinis (IP2I) de Lyon, CNRS/IN2P3, UMR5822, 69622 Villeurbanne, France.

Published: June 2022

AI Article Synopsis

  • The authors present a new mathematical model that describes how different virus variants compete over time, based on the concept of fixed points in their dynamics.
  • They modify traditional SIR models to include multiple competing variants and explain the variations in their spread through flow equations that converge at these fixed points.
  • The model is then applied to analyze the evolution of COVID-19 variants, and the results support the model's predictions, demonstrating its effectiveness in understanding viral competition.

Article Abstract

We propose a physics-inspired mathematical model underlying the temporal evolution of competing virus variants that relies on the existence of (quasi) fixed points capturing the large time scale invariance of the dynamics. To motivate our result we first modify the time-honoured compartmental models of the SIR type to account for the existence of competing variants and then show how their evolution can be naturally re-phrased in terms of flow equations ending at quasi fixed points. As the natural next step we employ (near) scale invariance to organise the time evolution of the competing variants within the effective description of the framework. We test the resulting theory against the time evolution of COVID-19 virus variants that validate the theory empirically.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8848575PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.physa.2022.127071DOI Listing

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