Endemic does not mean constant as SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve
Bibliographic record
Abstract
COVID-19 has become endemic, with dynamics that reflect the waning of immunity and re-exposure, by contrast to the epidemic phase driven by exposure in immunologically naïve populations. Endemic does not, however, mean constant. Further evolution of SARS-CoV-2, as well as changes in behavior and public health policy, continue to play a major role in the endemic load of disease and mortality. In this article, we analyze evolutionary models to explore the impact that a newly arising variant can have on the short-term and longer-term endemic load, characterizing how these impacts depend on the transmission and immunological properties of the variants. We describe how evolutionary changes in the virus will increase the endemic load most for a persistently immune-escape variant, by an intermediate amount for a more transmissible variant, and least for a transiently immune-escape variant. Balancing the tendency for evolution to favor variants that increase the endemic load, we explore the impact of vaccination strategies and non-pharmaceutical interventions that can counter these increases in the impact of disease. We end with some open questions about the future of COVID-19 as an endemic disease.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".