Join us for a conversation with Troy Day, Professor and Head of the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at Queen’s University. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has revealed that appropriate public health interventions for the control of infectious diseases must account for the possibility of pathogen evolution. In this presentation I will highlight how pathogen evolution has been a fundamental driver of SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology and how previous research in evolutionary biology can guide our understanding of this evolution. I will also consider what evolutionary biology can tell us about how we might expect SARS-CoV-2 to evolve in the future in response to increased immunity and vaccination.
Attendees are encouraged to read Day et al. 2020, “On the evolutionary epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2,” Otto et al. 2021, “The origins and potential future of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the evolving COVID-19 pandemic,” and the Day et al. preprint, “The evolutionary epidemiology of pathogens during vaccination campaigns.” Sign up here for the meeting link.