Control of COVID‐19 Outbreaks under Stochastic Community Dynamics, Bimodality, or Limited Vaccination
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Abstract
Reaching population immunity against COVID‐19 is proving difficult even in countries with high vaccination levels. Thus, it is critical to identify limits of control and effective measures against future outbreaks. The effects of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination strategies are analyzed with a detailed community‐specific agent‐based model (ABM). The authors demonstrate that the threshold for population immunity is not a unique number, but depends on the vaccination strategy. Prioritizing highly interactive people diminishes the risk for an infection wave, while prioritizing the elderly minimizes fatalities when vaccinations are low. Control over COVID‐19 outbreaks requires adaptive combination of NPIs and targeted vaccination, exemplified for Germany for January–September 2021. Bimodality emerges from the heterogeneity and stochasticity of community‐specific human–human interactions and infection networks, which can render the effects of limited NPIs uncertain. The authors' simulation platform can process and analyze dynamic COVID‐19 epidemiological situations in diverse communities worldwide to predict pathways to population immunity even with limited vaccination.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.16.20248301: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A caveat in our study is the setting of relatively small European communities with a limited number of schools, work- and public places. Another limitation of the current version of our approach is that it does not entail …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.16.20248301: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Institutional Review Board Statement not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:A caveat in our study is the setting of relatively small European communities with a limited number of schools, work- and public places. Another limitation of the current version of our approach is that it does not entail inter-community transport (travel) nor immunization of travelers, as has been suggested to be made mandatory by some airlines and may reduce epidemics30. Nevertheless, as we show that human interaction and infection transmission creates dynamic stochastic networks which should be exploited to fight the pandemic. Consequently, the optimization of vaccination strategies can be supported by network-based, location- and situation-specific analysis. We demonstrated that there is a tradeoff between different strategies for low levels of vaccination (vaccination by age minimizes fatalities, while vaccination by interactivity reduces infection events). However, at high vaccination coverage, vaccination by interaction prevails. It is important to note that the vaccination level giving rise to population level immunity is not a unique number but depends on the vaccination strategy. Our conclusions depend on the demographic structure and the heterogeneity in the interaction patterns and it can be assumed that the stronger the heterogeneity in interactions the better vaccination by interaction will perform. In summary, the situation remains complex and not fully predictable, e.g. due to bimodality/multimodality of intervention outcomes. Practically, to implement the str...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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