When can we stop wearing masks? Agent-based modeling to identify when vaccine coverage makes nonpharmaceutical interventions for reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections redundant in indoor gatherings
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Abstract
As vaccination efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic are ramping up worldwide, there are rising concerns that individuals will begin to eschew nonpharmaceutical interventions for preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission and attempt to return to pre-pandemic normalcy before vaccine coverage levels effectively mitigate transmission risk. In the U.S.A., some governing bodies have already weakened or repealed guidelines for nonpharmaceutical intervention use, despite a recent spike in national COVID-19 cases and majority population of unvaccinated individuals. Recent modeling suggests that repealing nonpharmaceutical intervention guidelines too early into vaccine rollouts will lead to localized increases in COVID-19 cases, but the magnitude of nonpharmaceutical intervention effects on individual-level SARS-CoV-2 infection risk in fully- and partially-vaccinated populations is unclear. We use a previously-published agent-based model to simulate SARS-CoV-2 transmission in indoor gatherings of varying durations, population densities, and vaccination coverage levels. By simulating nonpharmaceutical interventions in some gatherings but not others, we were able to quantify the difference in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk when nonpharmaceutical interventions were used, relative to scenarios with no nonpharmaceutical interventions. We found that nonpharmaceutical interventions will often reduce secondary attack rates, especially during brief interactions, and therefore there is no definitive vaccination coverage level that makes nonpharmaceutical interventions completely redundant. However, the reduction effect on absolute SARS-CoV-2 infection risk conferred by nonpharmaceutical interventions is likely proportional to COVID-19 prevalence. Therefore, if COVID-19 prevalence decreases in the future, nonpharmaceutical interventions will likely still confer protective effects but potential benefits may be small enough to remain within “effectively negligible” risk thresholds.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.19.21255737: (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:In addition to being unable to comment on community-level infection metrics, there are a few other limitations associated with our results that we must acknowledge. Aside from the ABM design limitations outlined in Farthing et al. (2021), we make a number of assumptions in our simulations. Most of these assumptions are directly tied to our parameter space detailed in Table 1, and include such things as: in simulated gatherings only one …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.19.21255737: (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:In addition to being unable to comment on community-level infection metrics, there are a few other limitations associated with our results that we must acknowledge. Aside from the ABM design limitations outlined in Farthing et al. (2021), we make a number of assumptions in our simulations. Most of these assumptions are directly tied to our parameter space detailed in Table 1, and include such things as: in simulated gatherings only one asymptomatic individual was in attendance, no individuals wear masks with exposure-reduction efficacies > 50% and therefore we are not simulating the use of N95 or similar masks, and there is no simulated forced-air ventilation or infectious individuals that produce superspreader-level of contaminated aerosols (e.g., 970 quanta (Miller et al. 2020)). Additionally, we do not simulate activity-specific behaviors and individuals in our simulations were unmoving. Finally, we based the infectiousness of asymptomatic individuals on the estimate given by Buonanno et al. (2020) (i.e., 142 quanta/hr), and to relate this estimate to ABM parameters we used the linear model described in Farthing et al. (2021). However, this parameterization procedure may have over-inflated virion transmissibility in certain scenarios because quanta-estimates are room-size specific, and the Farthing et al. (2021) linear model was based on simulations of gatherings within a relatively large room. In short, our results must be viewed through the lens of simulated world parame...
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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