Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Eales, Oliver
• de Oliveira Martins, Leonardo
• Page, Andrew J.
• Wang, Haowei
• Bodinier, Barbara
• Tang, David
• Haw, David
• Jonnerby, Jakob
• Atchison, Christina
• Ashby, Deborah
• Barclay, Wendy
• Taylor, Graham
• Cooke, Graham
• Ward, Helen
• Darzi, Ara
• Riley, Steven
• Elliott, Paul
• Donnelly, Christl A.
• Chadeau-Hyam, Marc

Titel

Dynamics of competing SARS-CoV-2 variants during the Omicron epidemic in England

Ist Teil von

• Nature communications, 2022-07, Vol.13 (1), p.4375-11, Article 4375

Ort / Verlag

London: Nature Publishing Group UK

Erscheinungsjahr

2022

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has been characterised by the regular emergence of genomic variants. With natural and vaccine-induced population immunity at high levels, evolutionary pressure favours variants better able to evade SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibodies. The Omicron variant (first detected in November 2021) exhibited a high degree of immune evasion, leading to increased infection rates worldwide. However, estimates of the magnitude of this Omicron wave have often relied on routine testing data, which are prone to several biases. Using data from the REal-time Assessment of Community Transmission-1 (REACT-1) study, a series of cross-sectional surveys assessing prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in England, we estimated the dynamics of England’s Omicron wave (from 9 September 2021 to 1 March 2022). We estimate an initial peak in national Omicron prevalence of 6.89% (5.34%, 10.61%) during January 2022, followed by a resurgence in SARS-CoV-2 infections as the more transmissible Omicron sub-lineage, BA.2 replaced BA.1 and BA.1.1. Assuming the emergence of further distinct variants, intermittent epidemics of similar magnitudes may become the ‘new normal’. This study presents data from the REACT-1 SARS-CoV-2 community sampling study in England from November 2021 to March 2022. They show that the Omicron variant peaked in January with a prevalence of ~7% and that the BA.2 sublineage had a 1.5x higher reproduction number compared to other Omicron sublineages.