Friday, October 15, 2021

Two Papers Highlight Amazing Speed of COVID Variant Replacement

From October 4 to October 14, two remarkable papers on COVID sequence epidemiology and the remarkable speed with which one strain replaces another.

The newest paper is Vohringer et al., Nature, on a year's worth of exploding then vanishing strains of COVID in England.   See the open access paper here, see an open access article in Genomeweb here.  See the explosive growth of the "red" then "brown" (delta) strains.

Vohringer, Nature

And from last week, see Tartof et al. reporting first, on vaccine effectiveness, but second, on strain epidemiology, in a Southern California population.   Lancet article by Tartof et al. here.   News report here.  Bar chart on strain replacement below:

Tartof, Lancet