Roadmap for the development of disease control strategies for coronaviruses

Contact networks

visit roadmap

Contact networks and quantified transmission pathways (R0)

Research Question

Understanding and quantifying the contact networks and transmission pathways of coronaviruses, particularly how they contribute to the spread of the virus within populations

Lack of knowledge on host susceptibility, virus circulation and general wildlife disease occurrence making it difficult to spot deviations from transmission trends and identify the cause of any unusual disease outbreaks
Asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission can introduce challenges in identifying infectious animals
Differences in susceptibility and transmission between host species makes understanding and predicting transmission networks challenging
Understanding the role of intermediate “hosts” which act as fomites, such as rodents or wild birds, for onward transmission
The population structures/densities and social behaviour of wildlife animals is not well understood therefore it’s difficult to develop accurate contact networks that reflect in situ transmission
Existence of undocumented/informal or illegal wildlife trade means that a proportion of transmission will also be unaccounted

Investing resources to study transmission pathways, particularly at the human/wildlife/domestic interphase
Continuous improvement of current models available, feeding in new data as it emerges
Developing better understanding of animal social behaviours, especially in wildlife animals and learn how to use this data to parameterise models
Identify wildlife strains of coronaviruses, sequence them and measure the importance of circulating strains in wildlife to infer potential impacts for transmission of emerging viruses/VOCs

The creation of efficient surveillance systems for coronaviruses, which includes establishing access to technologies in local settings
Creating and sharing a dataset of viruses and their corresponding susceptible host species