Eco-evolutionary constraints for the endemicity of rapidly evolving viruses

Abstract: Antigenic escape constitutes the main mechanism allowing rapidly evolving viruses to achieve endemicity. Beyond granting immune escape, empirical evidence also suggests that mutations of viruses might increase their inter-host transmissibility. While both mechanisms are well-studied individually, their combined effects on viral endemicity remain to be explored. Here we propose a minimal eco-evolutionary framework to simulate epidemic outbreaks generated by pathogens evolving both their transmissibility and immune escape. Our findings uncover a very rich phenomenology arising from the complex interplay between both evolutionary pathways and the underlying contagion dynamics. We first show that contagions at the population level constrain the effective evolution of the virus, accelerating the increase in transmissibility in the first epidemic wave while favoring antigenic variation in the transition to the endemic phase. Our results also reveal that accounting for both evolutionary pathways changes the features of the viruses more prone to become endemic. While chances for endemicity increase with infectiousness of the wild-type variant for viruses not evolving their transmissibility, a non-monotonic behavior is observed when the latter mechanism is included, favoring less transmissible viruses and impairing those ones with intermediate infectiousness.