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MERS-CoV spillover at the camel-human interface
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Essential revision 4 #22

Closed evogytis closed 6 years ago

evogytis commented 6 years ago

Easily addressed, but important. The paper already sounds a strong voice of concern in the final paragraph, but we think this could be even stronger. Antia et al Nature 2003 first showed, using a simple branching process, that for most genetic landscapes, the probability of a pathogen evolving to state with R0>1 increases dramatically as a function of the wild-type R0. So R0\~0.8 is much worse than R0\~0.3. More sophisticated models have been done since, especially by Llyod-smith's group, but the basic result is sound. In the light of this theoretical work, your findings are not at all reassuring.

evogytis commented 6 years ago

One of the few cases where reviewers want more alarm. My personal view is that "n mutations to pandemic" models are too simplistic and that genetic background of a pathogen is far more important for sustained transmission in humans. Anyone have strong feelings about including the reference + alarm versus arguing against it?

trvrb commented 6 years ago

I'm going to clean up the text just a bit here.