Credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed methods to quantify how much more or less transmissible new COVID variants are, which could have far-reaching implications for public health in terms of COVID-19 risk and the vaccination levels required to obtain herd immunity. Shown above, frequency of the B.1.1.7 strain in the UK (black dots) with the model prediction (blue line) assuming a transmission advantage of 45% over the baseline.