Decoupling between SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility and population mobility associated with increasing immunity from vaccination and infection in South America
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Abstract
All South American countries from the Southern cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) experienced severe COVID-19 epidemic waves during early 2021 driven by the expansion of variants Gamma and Lambda, however, there was an improvement in different epidemic indicators since June 2021. To investigate the impact of national vaccination programs and natural infection on viral transmission in those South American countries, we analyzed the coupling between population mobility and the viral effective reproduction number $$R_t$$ R t . Our analyses reveal that population mobility was highly correlated with viral $$R_t$$ R t from January to May 2021 in all countries analyzed; but a clear decoupling occurred since May–June 2021, when the rate of viral spread started to be lower than expected from the levels of social interactions. These findings support that populations from the South American Southern cone probably achieved the conditional herd immunity threshold to contain the spread of regional SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating at that time.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.16.21263701: (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 Sentences Resources This procedure was repeated for each combination of three categories among the six mobility measures provided by Google, and the combination achieving the best regression result was kept. Googlesuggested: (Google, RRID:SCR_017097)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some important limitations: (i) difficulty to estimate precisely the IFR and consequently to have a precise estimate of the cumulative number of naturally infected people at …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.09.16.21263701: (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 Sentences Resources This procedure was repeated for each combination of three categories among the six mobility measures provided by Google, and the combination achieving the best regression result was kept. Googlesuggested: (Google, RRID:SCR_017097)Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our study has some important limitations: (i) difficulty to estimate precisely the IFR and consequently to have a precise estimate of the cumulative number of naturally infected people at decoupling point in each country; (ii) sub-reporting of SARS-CoV-2 deaths might underestimate the cumulative number of infections and thus the HIT; (iii) the assumption that partially vaccinated people did not greatly contribute to reduce viral transmissions might have also underestimate the number of vaccine-immune individuals and the actual HIT; (iv) on the other hand, although we assumed some overlap between vaccinal immunity and natural immunity, the precise fraction of fully vaccinated individuals that were previously infected is unknown. Because of these limitations, the precise HIT estimated here should be interpreted with caution and should not be considered as general reference values for other countries. In summary, our study supports that populations from the South American Southern cone probably achieved the conditional HIT to contain the further spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants Gamma and Lambda at around mid-2021. Presumed herd immunity was probably mostly attained by natural infection in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and by a mixture of natural infections and vaccination in Chile and Uruguay. The widespread used of the Coronavac inactive viral vaccine in South America was not only effective to prevent the severe forms of COVID-19 disease but also has the potential to contain the...
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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