Scientific research

Risk for international importations of UK variant for countries with substantial population movement from the UK

A modelling study done by Dr Du and other researchers evaluated the risk of international importations of UK variant for SARS-CoV-2 infections. As this new variant was shown to have increased transmissibility, the risk of importation and its impact of local transmission should be investigated. In this article, they analyzed data from 15 countries and estimated that the chance that this variant was imported into these countries by travelers from the United Kingdom by December 7 was larger than 50%. Their projections suggested that countries with substantial population movement from the UK were likely to harbor cases of the 501Y variant by late October 2020.

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DOI: 10.3201/eid2705.210050