Regional importation and asymmetric within-country spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

Variants of concern (VOCs) of SARS-CoV-2 have caused resurging waves of infections worldwide. In the Netherlands, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta variants circulated widely between September 2020 and August 2021. To understand how various control measures had impacted the spread of these VOCs, we analyzed 39,844 SARS-CoV-2 genomes collected under the Dutch national surveillance program. We found that all four VOCs were introduced before targeted flight restrictions were imposed on countries where the VOCs first emerged. Importantly, foreign introductions, predominantly from other European countries, continued during these restrictions. Our findings show that flight restrictions had limited effectiveness in deterring VOC introductions due to the strength of regional land travel importation risks. We also found that the Alpha and Delta variants largely circulated more populous regions with international connections after their respective introduction before asymmetric bidirectional transmissions occurred with the rest of the country and the variant dominated infections in the Netherlands. As countries consider scaling down SARS-CoV-2 surveillance efforts in the post-crisis phase of the pandemic, our results highlight that robust surveillance in regions of early spread is important for providing timely information for variant detection and outbreak control.