Summarizing Global SARS-CoV-2 Geographical Spread by Phylogenetic Multitype Branching Models

Using available phylogeographical data of 3585 SARS–CoV–2 genomes we attempt at providing a global picture of the virus’s dynamics in terms of directly interpretable parameters. To this end we fit a hidden state multistate speciation and extinction model to a pre-estimated phylogenetic tree with information on the place of sampling of each strain. We find that even with such coarse–grained data the dominating transition rates exhibit weak similarities with the most popular, continent–level aggregated, airline passenger flight routes.