Likelihood of infecting or getting infected with COVID-19 as a function of vaccination status, as investigated with a stochastic model for New Zealand (Aotearoa) for Delta and Omicron variants

  1. Leighton M. Watson

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Abstract

Aim

The New Zealand government has transitioned from the Alert Level framework, which relied on government action and population level controls, to the COVID-19 Protection Framework, which relies on vaccination rates and allows for greater freedoms (for the vaccinated). Under the COVID-19 Protection Framework and current widespread community transmission of Omicron, there is significant interest in understanding the relative risk of spreading COVID-19 posed by unvaccinated, vaccinated, and boosted individuals.

Methods

A stochastic branching process model is used to simulate the spread of COVID-19 for outbreaks seeded by unvaccinated, vaccinated, or boosted individuals. The likelihood of infecting or getting infected with COVID-19 is calculated based on vaccination status. The model is applied to both the Delta and Omicron variants.

Results

For the Delta variant a vaccinated traveler infected with COVID-19 is 9x less likely to seed an outbreak than an unvaccinated traveler infected with COVID-19, however, for the Omicron variant there is little difference between outbreaks seeded by unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals (boosted individuals are slightly less likely to seed large outbreaks). For the Delta variant unvaccinated individuals are responsible for 87% of all infections whereas only 3% of infections are from vaccinated to vaccinated when normalized by population. Therefore, a vaccinated individual is 6.8x more likely to be infected by an unvaccinated individual than by a vaccinated individual. For the Omicron variant unvaccinated individuals are responsible for 45% of all infections compared to 39% for vaccinated (two-doses) and 15% for boosted (three-doses) individuals when normalized by population. Despite the vaccine being less effective at preventing breakthrough transmission for Omicron, only 3% of all infections are from boosted to boosted individuals when normalized by population indicating that three doses of the vaccine provide good protection from infection and breakthrough transmission.

Conclusions

This work demonstrates that most new infections are caused by unvaccinated individuals, especially for the Delta variant. These simulations illustrate the importance of vaccination in stopping individuals from becoming infected with COVID-19 and in preventing onward transmission. For Omicron, individuals vaccinated with two doses are only slightly less likely to spread COVID-19 than those who are unvaccinated. This work suggests that for the current Omicron outbreak the COVID-19 Protection Framework should potentially be updated to distinguish between those who have received two primary doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine (vaccinated individuals) and those who have received three doses (boosted individuals).

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  1. Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.28.21266967v2 on medRxiv
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.11.28.21266967: (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: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.11.28.21266967v1 on medRxiv