ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Infectious Diseases: Epidemiology and Prevention
This article is part of the Research TopicMathematical Modelling and Data Analysis in Infectious DiseasesView all 13 articles
Utility of Compartmental Models to Test the Competing 1 Hypotheses of Pathogen Evolution and Human Intervention 2
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Missouri, Kansas City, Kansas City, United States
- 2University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh
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Compartmental models are essential for studying host-pathogen dynamics, evaluating intervention 9 effectiveness, and predicting infection trends. Building on these applications, this work demonstrates 10 the use of such models to evaluate competing hypotheses related to pathogen evolution and human 11 interventions. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, we formulate hypotheses of SARS-CoV-12 2 mutation and construct a transmission model to test them. In addition to analyzing steady-state 13 stability, deriving the basic reproduction number, and identifying a backward bifurcation, the model 14 is fitted to seven peaks of U.S. COVID-19 data, each corresponding to periods of viral mutation and 15 morbidity peaks. The estimated posterior probabilities reveal that Short-term within host selection 16 primarily shaped mutations during the early pandemic stages, followed by immune selection driven 17 by natural and vaccine-induced immunity. In later stages, mutations aligned with vaccination-induced 18 virulence and transmission-virulence correlation, while the declining virulence and immune selection 19 partially explained the final stages of SARS-CoV-2 mutation. In conclusion, model-based hypothesis 20 testing offers a powerful yet underutilized approach to uncovering drivers of viral mutation and gaining 21 deeper insights into pathogen evolution during outbreaks.
Keywords: evolution, Host-Pathogen Interpaly, model-based hypothesis testing, transmissibility, Virulence
Received: 09 Sep 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Saha, Bani-Yaghoub and Podder. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Majid Bani-Yaghoub
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