UNC’s Ronit Freeman is working to understand how Omicron’s mutations make it the most infectious variant yet. A new paper examines how the increased positive charge on the surface of spike proteins of variants is affecting the virus’ interactions with its receptors. 

Carolina researcher Peter Reinhard Hansen uses econometrics methods to show that the omicron variant is three times more contagious than delta in an analysis of Danish data. His model can be adapted to predict the infectiousness of future viral variants.