Quantifying the Effects of Non-Pharmaceutical and Pharmaceutical Interventions Against Covid-19 Epidemic in the Republic of Korea: Mathematical Model-Based Approach Considering Age Groups and the Delta Variant
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Abstract
Early vaccination efforts and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were insufficient to prevent a surge of COVID-19 cases triggered by the Delta variant. A compartment model that includes age, vaccination, and variants was developed. We estimated the transmission rates using maximum likelihood estimation, and phase-dependent NPIs according to government policies from 26 February to 8 October 2021. Simulations were done to examine the effects of varying dates of initiation and intensity of eased NPIs, arrival timing of Delta, and speed of vaccine administration. The estimated transmission rate matrices show distinct patterns, with transmission rates of younger groups (0-39 years) much larger with Delta. Social distancing (SD) level 2 and SD4 in Korea were associated with transmission reduction factors of 0.63-0.70 and 0.70-0.78, respectively. The easing of NPIs to a level comparable to SD2 should be initiated not earlier than 16 October to keep the number of severe cases below Korea’s healthcare capacity. Simulations showed that a surge prompted by Delta can be prevented if the number of people vaccinated daily or SD level when Delta arrived was higher. The timing of easing, intensity of NPIs, vaccination speed, and screening measures are key factors in preventing another epidemic wave.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.01.21265729: (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
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:There are several limitations of this research. First, the contact pattern in the matrices was already affected by NPIs and might be not identical to the contact pattern before COVID-19, necessitating the normalization done on the matrices. For example, transmission rate among those age 0-17 might be underestimated because of restricted …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.01.21265729: (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
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:There are several limitations of this research. First, the contact pattern in the matrices was already affected by NPIs and might be not identical to the contact pattern before COVID-19, necessitating the normalization done on the matrices. For example, transmission rate among those age 0-17 might be underestimated because of restricted attendance in schools. Second, vaccine waning is not considered. However, booster shots are administered and vaccine hesitancy remains low in Korea, which mean that the effect of administered vaccines might be maintained [22]. Third, our age-age matrix focused on the Delta variant, and we were not able to examine transmission of other previous variants. The coverage of genomic surveillance among COVID-19 cases in Korea has steadily increased, and it covers about 30% of all confirmed cases. Therefore, the number of cases with genomic results before the occurrence of the Delta variant was small to be analyzed separately by variant types. Our result highlighted the transmission pattern of Delta, which is currently the dominant variant in most countries.
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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