The interplay between vaccination and social distancing strategies affects COVID19 population-level outcomes
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Abstract
Social distancing is an effective population-level mitigation strategy to prevent COVID19 propagation but it does not reduce the number of susceptible individuals and bears severe social consequences—a dire situation that can be overcome with the recently developed vaccines. Although a combination of these interventions should provide greater benefits than their isolated deployment, a mechanistic understanding of the interplay between them is missing. To tackle this challenge we developed an age-structured deterministic model in which vaccines are deployed during the pandemic to individuals who do not show symptoms. The model allows for flexible and dynamic prioritization strategies with shifts between target groups. We find a strong interaction between social distancing and vaccination in their effect on the proportion of hospitalizations. In particular, prioritizing vaccines to elderly (60+) before adults (20-59) is more effective when social distancing is applied to adults or uniformly. In addition, the temporal reproductive number R t is only affected by vaccines when deployed at sufficiently high rates and in tandem with social distancing. Finally, the same reduction in hospitalization can be achieved via different combination of strategies, giving decision makers flexibility in choosing public health policies. Our study provides insights into the factors that affect vaccination success and provides methodology to test different intervention strategies in a way that will align with ethical guidelines.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.22.20248622: (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.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Nevertheless, when interpreted within the known limitations, this study provides valuable insights into the joint effect of vaccination and social distancing and the mechanisms underling their interplay. It also provides initial guidelines for policy makers. For example, we find that the same level of overall efficiency in reducing hospitalizations can be obtained via different combinations of social distancing, vaccine prioritization and …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.22.20248622: (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.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Nevertheless, when interpreted within the known limitations, this study provides valuable insights into the joint effect of vaccination and social distancing and the mechanisms underling their interplay. It also provides initial guidelines for policy makers. For example, we find that the same level of overall efficiency in reducing hospitalizations can be obtained via different combinations of social distancing, vaccine prioritization and vaccine deployment rates, providing policy makers with a range of possibilities. Moreover, our model can be readily used and easily modified to generate and test a range of hypotheses and strategies for vaccination. For example, policy-makers can examine strategies that reduce deaths or those that prioritize vaccines to adults to avoid economic inactivity. Such strategies and others can be tested by modifying the effectiveness measure FX where X may be any combination of S, E, I, A, U, R, H, and V. In addition, we did not include children in our targeted interventions because vaccine is not available for them (yet), and to reduce the complexity of the experimental design. Future studies can test the effect of social distancing and/or vaccination targeted at children. Finally, it will also be important to include information on proportion of people that refuse to take a vaccine. This study deals with an ethical question: Who should be vaccinated first? We do not presume to answer this question, to which some guidelines have been laid out [8, ...
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.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
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