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From Sequences to Strategies: Early Detection of New SARS-CoV-2 Variants via Genetic Distance to Reduce Hospitalizations

2025-09-05 epidemiology Title + abstract only
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The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the critical need for robust methods to monitor viral evolution and detect emerging variants of concern (VOCs). Traditional genomic surveillance often lacks predictive power. This study expanded an unsupervised machine learning clustering algorithm, based on SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein Levenshtein distance, to track and predict variant predominance across six European countries from 2020 to January 2024. We also investigated the influence of genetic distances and c...

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