Global prediction for monkeypox epidemic (preprint)

The monkeypox epidemic has now spread all over the world and has become an epidemic of widespread concern in the international community. Before the emergence of targeted vaccines and specific drugs, it is necessary to numerically simulate and predict the epidemic. In order to better understand and grasp its transmission situation, and put forward some countermeasures accordingly, we predicted and simulated monkeypox transmission and vaccination scenarios using models developed for COVID-19 predictions. The results suggest the monkeypox epidemic will spread to almost all countries in the world by the end of 2022 based on modified SEIR model prediction. The total number of people infected with monkeypox will reach 100,000. The top five countries will be the United States, Brazil, Germany, France and Britain with more than 28000, 20000, 4000, 4500 and 4000 cases respectively. If 30% of the population is vaccinated, the number of infected people will drop by 35%.

The Advantage of Inactivated Vaccine for Preventing the Omicron Outbreak (preprint)

The COVID-19 pandemic has now become very severe as never before due to the overwhelming spread of Omicron. We found that Omicron outbreak can be effectively prevented by inactivated vaccines, which averted an outbreak of more than 1.6 million people in Hangzhou, China. The 36 mutations in the target spike protein of Omicron neutralizing antibody enable it to evade the immune protection afforded by vaccines. This is because that mRNA and adenovirus-vector vaccines are designed to recognize the spike (S) glycoprotein of the SARS-CoV-2 wild-type (WT) strain. However, Inactivated vaccines contain the whole viral antigens and remain stable in their recognition of newly emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2. Our study confirmed the advantage of inactivated vaccines in the face of highly mutated Omicron variant and provided a basis for the development of effective vaccines to prevent future long-term transmission, mutation and recurrence of SARS-CoV-2.

Seasonal Prediction of Omicron Pandemic (preprint)

The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has pushed the world in the face of another huge outbreak. In order to have a better understanding on the fast transmission of Omicron variant, we made seasonal predictions on the development of Omicron pandemic globally, as well as 11 key countries. The results demonstrated that the pandemic has an exponential-like growth rate at the initial stage of the outbreak, and will have small resurgences around April and June in north hemisphere countries and south hemisphere countries, respectively.