The reproduction rate of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 different variants recently circulated in human: a narrative review

SARS-COV-2 is responsible for the current worldwide pandemic, which started on December 2019 in Wuhan, China. On March 2020 World Health Organization announced COVID-19 as the new pandemic. Some SARS-COV-2 variants have increased transmissibility, cause more severe disease (e.g., increased hospitalizations or deaths), are resistant to antibodies produced by the previous infection or vaccination, and there is more difficulty in treatment and diagnosis of them. World Health Organization considered them as SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern. The introductory reproduction rate (R(0)) is an epidemiologic index of the transmissibility of the virus, defined as the average number of persons infected by the virus after known contact with an infectious person in a susceptible population. An R(0) > 1 means that the virus is spreading exponentially, and R(0) < 1, means that the outbreak is subsiding. In various studies, the estimated R and VOC growth rates were reported to be greater than the ancestral strains. However, it was also a low level of concordance between the estimated Rt of the same variant in different studies. It is because the R of a variant not only dependent on the biological and intrinsic factors of the virus but also several parameters can affect the R0, including the duration of contagiousness and the likelihood of infection per contact. Evaluation of changes in SARS-CoV-2 has shown that the rate of human-to-human transmission of this virus has increased. Like other viruses with non-human sources which succeeded in surviving in the human population, SARS-CoV-2 has gradually adapted to the human population, and its ability to transmit from human to human has increased. Of course, due to the continuous changes in this virus, it is crucial to survey the rate of transmission of the virus over time.