Mathematical Modelling of the Impact of Human Immune Diversity on COVID-19 transmission
While within-host and between-host models of COVID-19 dynamics have been widely studied in isolation, connecting the immunological and epidemiological scales through multi-scale models is necessary to incorporate individual and population-oriented approaches. Multi-scale models provide a deeper understanding of individual heterogeneity’s role in developing epidemics. Intra-individual and inter-individual dynamics of COVID-19 are intrinsically linked. Thus, finding the appropriate functional links between these two scales are important to accurately model the interactions between epidemiological (between-host) and immunological (within-host) processes. Here, I present a new mathematical model that explicitly combines the individual and population-level dynamics to give new insights and perspectives into how the SARS-CoV-2-immune dynamics at the within-host scale influence the epidemiological transmission dynamics at the between-host scale. Our work casts light on the potential effects of various host immunizations on COVID-19 disease transmission.