Since the news of a potentially more transmissible strain of C19 broke in the UK, I’ve been thinking about the mechanics.

I was initially sceptical because it seemed to help politicians evade blame. Given the earlier fuss about a strain spread by holidaymakers returning from Spain in the summer, how much of the emergence of a new strain was down to network effects (common because it was, for example, present in a number of super-spreader events) versus inherent infectiousness?

So I simulated, with a workbench of 160000 agents in a 2D grid network, 1600 seed infections, and daily contact between 23 of the nearest 24 neighbours, and one random remote case. Base infectiousness, death and recovery rates are set to yield an R0 of about 3 and a SIR plot as in Figure 1.