Fig. 1

Model of the natural history of three COVID-19 variants: ancestral (blue), Delta (green), and Omicron (red). The illustrated profiles are sampled from 2 random agents. Each profile rises exponentially until reaching the infectivity peak, followed by a linear decrease until full recovery. Vertical lines mark the mean incubation period for the three considered variants (ancestral: blue, Delta: green, and Omicron: red), with the means following a log normal distribution. The mean incubation period and recovery period for each of the variants are reported in Appendix Table 6. The inset shows \(R_0\) of the three considered variants