Comparison of the 2021 COVID-19 roadmap projections against public health data in England

  1. Matt J. Keeling
  2. Louise Dyson
  3. Michael J. Tildesley
  4. Edward M. Hill
  5. Samuel Moore

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Abstract

Control and mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic in England has relied on a combination of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Some of these NPIs are extremely costly (economically and socially), so it was important to relax these promptly without overwhelming already burdened health services. The eventual policy was a Roadmap of four relaxation steps throughout 2021, taking England from lock-down to the cessation of all restrictions on social interaction. In a series of six Roadmap documents generated throughout 2021, models assessed the potential risk of each relaxation step. Here we show that the model projections generated a reliable estimation of medium-term hospital admission trends, with the data points up to September 2021 generally lying within our 95% prediction intervals. The greatest uncertainties in the modelled scenarios came from vaccine efficacy estimates against novel variants, and from assumptions about human behaviour in the face of changing restrictions and risk.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41467-022-31991-0
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.03.17.22272535v2 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.03.17.22272535: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

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    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).

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    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2022.03.17.22272535v1 on medRxiv