Estimating real-world COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Israel using aggregated counts
This article has been Reviewed by the following groups
Listed in
- Evaluated articles (ScreenIT)
Abstract
The vaccination roll-out of the COVID-19 vaccines in Israel has been highly successful. By February 22th, approximately 47% of the population has already been administered at least one dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. Efforts to estimate the true real-world effectiveness of the vaccine have been hampered by disease dynamics and social-economic discrepancies. Here, using counts of positive and hospitalized cases of vaccinated individuals, we conduct a sensitivity analysis of the vaccine effectiveness. Under an assumption of no effectiveness on the first two weeks after the 1st dose, we observe very low effectiveness on the third week. After the 2nd dose, on weeks 1 and 2 we find 73-85% effectiveness in reducing positive cases, hospitalizations, and severe cases, which increase to 89-97% effectiveness 14 days after the 2nd dose. As more granular data will be available, it will be possible to extract more exact estimates; however, the emerging evidence suggests that the vaccine is highly effective.
Article activity feed
-
-
-
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.05.21251139: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our analysis suffers from many limitations. First, all analyses are performed on aggregated counts, which limits the possibilities to make individual-level inferences. Second, there are delays in reporting of cases and especially hospitalizations, so it is expected that some of the observed counts may increase. Third, cases may be complicated several days after infection, and thus the severe counts are expected to increase in all four …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.05.21251139: (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: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Our analysis suffers from many limitations. First, all analyses are performed on aggregated counts, which limits the possibilities to make individual-level inferences. Second, there are delays in reporting of cases and especially hospitalizations, so it is expected that some of the observed counts may increase. Third, cases may be complicated several days after infection, and thus the severe counts are expected to increase in all four groups. Fourth, In Israel, many individuals may get tested without symptoms, and there is an incentive to get tested if you are required to be in isolation due to contact with an infected individual. However, this incentive is reduced 7 days after the second dose, as the law now exempts those from isolation. Thus, there is a difference in testing rates of asymptomatic individuals between groups. It is reassuring to see that there are relatively similar levels of effectiveness of those 7 days after the second dose to those before those 7 days, suggesting that this testing incentive has only a marginal effect. Fifth, the general population incidence is also affected by the vaccination rollout, as more individuals are vaccinated, the incidence is expected to be affected by the vaccination; thus the real effectiveness might be higher than our estimates. Other attempts to identify the impact of the vaccination campaign in Israel are underway. Chodik et al. compared cases in vaccinated individuals on days 13-24 after the first dose with vaccinated ind...
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 scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
-