Role of Error Catastrophe in Transmission Ability of Virus

Abstract

The role played by "error catastrophe" is explicitly taken into account in the mathematical formulation to analyze the COVID-19 data. The idea is to combine the mathematical genetics formalism of the error catastrophe of mutations in the virus gene loci with the standard model of epidemics which lacks the explicit incorporation of the mutation effect on the spreading of the viruses. We apply the formalism to the case of SARS-CoV-2 virus. We assume the "universality" of the error catastrophe in the process of analyzing the data. This means that some basic parameter to describe the error catastrophe is independent of which group (country or city) we deal with. Concretely, we analyze the omicron data of South Africa and then analyze the cases of Japan using the same value of the basic parameter derived in the South Africa analysis. The result shows the validity of our universality assumption.