Model-based analysis on social acceptability and feasibility of a focused protection strategy against the COVID-19 pandemic
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Abstract
This paper studies the social acceptability and feasibility of a focused protection strategy against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). We propose a control scheme to develop herd immunity while satisfying the following two basic requirements for a viable policy option. The first requirement is social acceptability: the overall deaths should be minimized for social acceptance. The second is feasibility: the healthcare system should not be overwhelmed to avoid various adverse effects. To exploit the fact that the disease severity increases considerably with age and comorbidities, we assume that some focused protection measures for those high-risk individuals are implemented and the disease does not spread within the high-risk population. Because the protected population has higher severity ratios than the unprotected population by definition, the protective measure can substantially reduce mortality in the whole population and also avoid the collapse of the healthcare system. Based on a simple susceptible-infected-recovered model, social acceptability and feasibility of the proposed strategy are summarized into two easily computable conditions. The proposed framework can be applied to various populations for studying the viability of herd immunity strategies against COVID-19. For Japan, herd immunity may be developed by the proposed scheme if $${\mathcal {R}}_0 \le 2.0$$ R 0 ≤ 2.0 and the severity rates of the disease are 1/10 times smaller than the previously reported value, although as high mortality as seasonal influenza is expected.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.19.20107524: (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:Limitations: Our framework has several apparent limitations, of which we highlight the following two. First, our mathematical model is a stylized simplification of any reality. We assume the simplest SIR model as the epidemic …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.19.20107524: (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:Limitations: Our framework has several apparent limitations, of which we highlight the following two. First, our mathematical model is a stylized simplification of any reality. We assume the simplest SIR model as the epidemic dynamics, which may overestimate the herd immunity threshold p* [22]. For simplicity, we consider a strict protection measure for high-risk individuals under which they are entirely confined, but a more realistic approach would be age-diversified social distancing measure as considered in [13, 23]. Reliable estimates for the number of infected individuals in the population are crucial for implementing an adaptive control scheme as the proposed one and assessing howclose it is to herd immunity. The introduction of systematic antibody tests at scale would be of high priority [5, 24, 25]. It will also provide better estimates for the severity of the disease. Second, our analyses assume lifelong immunity after recovery for simplicity. However, how long immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) lasts, or whether we can develop sufficient immunity against SARS-CoV-2 in the first place, are still unknown. If sufficient immunity against the virus can not be developed, herd immunity strategies, in general, would fail. Due to unanswered questions about the pathogen, including the ones mentioned above, extreme care should be taken before adopting any form of herd immunity policies. Should a herd immunity policy be adopted despite...
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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