The airborne transmission of viruses causes tight transmission bottlenecks

Patrick Sinclair, Lei Zhao, Clive B. Beggs and Christopher J. R. Illingworth ()
Additional contact information
Patrick Sinclair: MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research
Lei Zhao: University of Copenhagen
Clive B. Beggs: Leeds Beckett University
Christopher J. R. Illingworth: MRC University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract The transmission bottleneck describes the number of viral particles that initiate an infection in a new host. Previous studies have used genome sequence data to suggest that transmission bottlenecks for influenza and SARS-CoV-2 involve few viral particles, but the general principles of virus transmission are not fully understood. Here we show that, across a broad range of circumstances, tight transmission bottlenecks are a simple consequence of the physical process of airborne viral transmission. We use mathematical modelling to describe the physical process of the emission and inhalation of infectious particles, deriving the result that that the great majority of transmission bottlenecks involve few viral particles. While exceptions to this rule exist, the circumstances needed to create these exceptions are likely very rare. We thus provide a physical explanation for previous inferences of bottleneck size, while predicting that tight transmission bottlenecks prevail more generally in respiratory virus transmission.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47923-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-47923-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-47923-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().