Herd immunity vs suppressed equilibrium in COVID-19 pandemic: different goals require different models for tracking

  1. Norden E. Huang
  2. Fangli Qiao
  3. Wang Qian
  4. Ka-Kit Tung

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Abstract

New COVID-19 epicenters have sprung up in Europe and US as the epidemic in China wanes. Many mechanistic models’ past predictions for China were widely off the mark (1, 2), and still vary widely for the new epicenters, due to uncertain disease characteristics. The epidemic ended in Wuhan, and later in South Korea, with less than 1% of their population infected, much less than that required to achieve “herd immunity”. Now as most countries pursue the goal of “suppressed equilibrium”, the traditional concept of “herd immunity” in epidemiology needs to be re-examined. Traditional model predictions of large potential impacts serve their purpose in prompting policy decisions on contact suppression and lockdown to combat the spread, and are useful for evaluating various scenarios. After imposition of these measures it is important to turn to statistical models that incorporate real-time information that reflects ongoing policy implementation and degrees of compliance to more realistically track and project the epidemic’s course. Here we apply such a tool, supported by theory and validated by past data as accurate, to US and Europe. Most countries started with a Reproduction Number of 4 and declined to around 1 at a rate highly dependent on contact-reduction measures.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.03.28.20046177: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and 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.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • 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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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.03.28.20046177v3 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.03.28.20046177v2 on medRxiv
  4. Version published to 10.1101/2020.03.28.20046177v1 on medRxiv