Politecnico di Milano: A NEW EPIDEMIOLOGICAL INDEX FOR SARS-COV-2 TRANSMISSION

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the concept of reproduction number (R) has become widely used and has been used as a parameter to assess the progress of the epidemic.

A less well-known fact about reproduction numbers is that they refer to the long-term temporal evolution of an epidemic, which means that their value determines whether a given pathogen will eventually become established as endemic in the community (R > 1) or disappear from it (R < 1), without generally providing any indication of the dynamics of disease transmission in the short term.

This observation was the starting point for the study “The epidemicity index of recurrent SARS-CoV-2 infections”, just published in Nature Communications and carried out by Politecnico di Milano researchers Lorenzo Mari, Renato Casagrandi, Stefano Miccoli and Marino Gatto, in collaboration with colleagues from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, the University of Padua and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.