Preliminary risk analysis of the international spread of new COVID-19 variants, lineage B.1.1.7, B.1.351 and P.1

Tatem@soton.ac.uk The novel SARS-CoV-2 variants have raised serious concerns about a new wave of the pandemic and the effectiveness of vaccines, particularly concerning the recent new strains (lineages B.1.1.7, B.1.351, and P.1) found in the UK, South Africa, and Brazil [1-3]. [...] We used de-identified and aggregated worldwide population movement data from billions of geotagged tweets and SafeGraph data from October – December 2020, derived using the ODT Flow Explorer [4], to explore the main destinations of international travellers departing from the UK, South Africa, and Brazil into other regions, and to assess the risk of new variants spreading across the World during th. [...] 10 Acknowledgements We acknowledge the efforts of the researchers that are part of the cov-lineages.org team in generating and assembling the data on new strains, and researchers from the ODT Flow Explorer in deriving the openly available mobility data. [...] We also acknowledge the support of the wider WorldPop team in the production of these initial outputs. [...] The total number of Twitter users and the proportion of users as a percentage of the population of that country (the penetration rate) are given in Table A1.