Extending EpiEstim to estimate the transmission advantage of pathogen variants in real-time: SARS-CoV-2 as a case-study

The evolution of SARS-CoV-2 has demonstrated that emerging variants can set back the global COVID-19 response. The ability to rapidly assess the threat of new variants is critical for timely optimisation of control strategies. We present a novel method to estimate the effective transmission advantage of a new variant compared to a reference variant combining information across multiple locations and over time. Through an extensive simulation study designed to mimic real-time epidemic contexts, we show that our method performs well across a range of scenarios and provide guidance on its optimal use and interpretation of results. We also provide an open-source software implementation of our method. The computational speed of our tool enables users to rapidly explore spatial and temporal variations in the estimated transmission advantage. We estimate that the SARS-CoV-2 Alpha variant is 1.46 (95% Credible Interval 1.44–1.47) and 1.29, (95% CrI 1.29–1.30) times more transmissible than the wild type, using data from England and France respectively. We further estimate that Delta is 1.77 (95% CrI: 1.69–1.85) times more transmissible than Alpha (England data). Our approach can be used as an important first step towards quantifying the threat of emerging or co-circulating variants of infectious pathogens in real-time.