No association between the SARS-CoV-2 variants and mortality rates in the Eastern Mediterranean Region.

"appendix a supplementary data the following are the supplementary data to this article: supplementary data 1 acknowledgments s o is the recipient of a joint doctoral fellowship from the american university of beirut (aub) and the national council for scientific research of lebanon (cnrs-l)."

"Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

"S.O. is the recipient of a joint doctoral fellowship from the American University of Beirut (AUB) and the National Council for Scientific Research of Lebanon (CNRS-L). We gratefully acknowledge the authors from the originating laboratories responsible for obtaining the specimens, as well as the submitting laboratories where the genome data were generated and shared via GISAID, on which this research is based (a detailed list of authors and laboratories can be found in the supplementary material). We also thank Dr. Colin A. Smith and Dr. Heinrich zu Dohnna (Biology department, American University of Beirut) for their valuable comments."