Mathematical modeling of the dynamics of COVID-19 variants of concern: Asymptotic and finite-time perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic has seen multiple waves, in part due to the implementation and relaxation of social distancing measures by the public health authorities around the world, and also caused by the emergence of new variants of concern (VOCs) of the SARS-Cov-2 virus. As the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to transition into an endemic state, how to manage outbreaks caused by newly emerging VOCs has become one of the primary public health issues. Using mathematical modeling tools, we investigated the dynamics of VOCs, both in a general theoretical framework and based on observations from public health data of past COVID-19 waves, with the objective of understanding key factors that determine the dominance and coexistence of VOCs. Our results show that the transmissibility advantage of a new VOC is a main factor for it to become dominant. Additionally, our modeling study indicates that the initial number of people infected with the new VOC plays an important role in determining the size of the epidemic. Our results also support the evidence that public health measures targeting the newly emerging VOC taken in the early phase of its spread can limit the size of the epidemic caused by the new VOC (Wu et al., 2139Wu, Scarabel, Majeed, Bragazzi, & Orbinski, ; Wu et al., 2021).