This conversation was led by Troy Day, Professor and Head of the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has revealed that appropriate public health interventions for the control of infectious diseases must account for the possibility of pathogen evolution. In this presentation, Day highlighted how pathogen evolution has been a fundamental driver of SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology and how previous research in evolutionary biology can guide our understanding of this evolution. He also considered what evolutionary biology can tell us about how we might expect SARS-CoV-2 to evolve in the future in response to increased immunity and vaccination.
Resources discussed:
- Day et al. 2020, “On the evolutionary epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2”
- Otto et al. 2021, “The origins and potential future of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the evolving COVID-19 pandemic”
- Day et al. preprint, “The evolutionary epidemiology of pathogens during vaccination campaigns”
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