The importance of utilizing travel history metadata for informative phylogeographical inferences: a case study of early SARS-CoV-2 introductions into Australia

Abstract

Inferring the spatiotemporal spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) via Bayesian phylogeography has been complicated by the overwhelming sampling bias present in the global genomic dataset. Previous work has demonstrated the utility of metadata in addressing this bias. Specifically, the inclusion of recent travel history of SARS-CoV-2-positive individuals into extended phylogeographical models has demonstrated increased accuracy of estimates, along with proposing alternative hypotheses that were not apparent using only genomic and geographical data. However, as the availability of comprehensive epidemiological metadata is limited, many of the current estimates..