Influence of heterogeneous age-group contact patterns on critical vaccination rates for herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2

  1. Joan Saldaña
  2. Caterina Scoglio

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Abstract

Currently, several western countries have more than half of their population fully vaccinated against COVID-19. At the same time, some of them are experiencing a fourth or even a fifth wave of cases, most of them concentrated in sectors of the populations whose vaccination coverage is lower than the average. So, the initial scenario of vaccine prioritization has given way to a new one where achieving herd immunity is the primary concern. Using an age-structured vaccination model with waning immunity, we show that, under a limited supply of vaccines, a vaccination strategy based on minimizing the basic reproduction number allows for the deployment of a number of vaccine doses lower than the one required for maximizing the vaccination coverage. Such minimization is achieved by giving greater protection to those age groups that, for a given social contact pattern, have smaller fractions of susceptible individuals at the endemic equilibrium without vaccination, that is, to those groups that are more vulnerable to infection.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41598-022-06477-0
  2. Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.03.21265897v2 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.03.21265897: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All data are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1215899, and can be retrieved within R using the socialmixr package.
    Zenodo
    suggested: (ZENODO, RRID:SCR_004129)

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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.

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

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  4. Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.03.21265897v1 on medRxiv