Coronaviruses roadmap:
Control Strategies
Roadmap for the development of disease control strategies for coronaviruses
Download 202410 Draft Coronavirus Disease control research roadmap Final5
Contact networks
Dependencies
Next steps
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
Research Gaps and Challenges
- 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
Solution Routes
- 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
Dependencies
- 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
State Of the Art
- Reservoir-People (RP) transmission network model for CoV-2 to calculate Ro and assess transmissibility Chen et al. 2020. https://idpjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40249-020-00640-3?report=reader; median incubation period is approximately 4–6 days for SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 Kane et al. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-animal-020420-025011#_i7
Projects
What activities are planned or underway?
Differential susceptibility of SARS-CoV-2 in animals : Evidence of ACE2 host receptor distribution in companion animals, livestock and wildlife by immunohistochemical characterisation
Planned Completion date 26/07/2021
Participating Country(s):
Netherlands
Veterinary Biocontained facility Network for excellence in animal infectiology research and experimentation
Planned Completion date 28/02/2023
Participating Country(s):
Europe