Barrier Gesture Relaxation during Vaccination Campaign in France: Modelling Impact of Waning Immunity
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Abstract
Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been implemented intermittently for more than a year in most countries of the world to mitigate the COVID-19 epidemic. In France, while the vaccination campaign is progressing, the French government has decided to remove many public health restrictions such as business closure, lockdowns, and curfews. Nonetheless, social distancing, mask wearing, and hand washing (also called barrier gestures) are still recommended. We utilize an age-structured compartmental SEIR model that takes into account the SARS-CoV-2 waning immunity, vaccination, and increased transmissibility from variants of concern to estimate if barrier gestures can be relaxed without causing a resurgence of severe infections. This model assumes that the susceptibility to infection is a function of immunity status, which depends on initial infection severity and vaccination status. It is calibrated on confirmed COVID-19 cases from the French surveillance database, and accounts for changes in contact behaviors due to the implementation of nation-wide public health policies. We study the partial and full relaxation of barrier gestures occurring from August to December 2021 under various immunity duration assumptions. Maintaining the application of barrier gestures appears essential to avoid a resurgence of severe infections that would exceed French health care capacities, while surmounting vaccine hesitancy represents the key to consider their relaxation. Immunity duration assumptions significantly influence the short-term dynamic of the epidemic, which should be considered for further modelling.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.29.21262788: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Another limitation is that our model underestimates vaccine efficacy against severe infections after 2 doses, assuming that it is equal to vaccine efficacy against all infections (which is set to 80% in the main analysis). However, assuming an optimistic 90% vaccine efficacy after 2 doses against infections and severe cases, leads to …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.08.29.21262788: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Another limitation is that our model underestimates vaccine efficacy against severe infections after 2 doses, assuming that it is equal to vaccine efficacy against all infections (which is set to 80% in the main analysis). However, assuming an optimistic 90% vaccine efficacy after 2 doses against infections and severe cases, leads to similar conclusions with no possibility to fully relax barrier gestures safely. Moreover, we did not account for the increased risk of hospitalization related to the alpha variant compared to the historical strain 63 which could explain that our ICU hospitalizations/prevalent I4 ratio tends to increase over the calibration period. This could lead to an underestimation of the ICU hospitalizations rebound. Finally, we did not account for the age-related immune response heterogeneity to SARS-CoV2 infection and vaccine, which will have to be considered in the future to investigate more accurately the impact of a booster vaccination campaign among elderly. In conclusion, while the durability of immunity provided by an infection or by vaccination remains uncertain, we provide an insight on the predictable dynamic of the epidemic in France assuming that immunity wanes. To date, maintaining the application of barrier gestures seems unavoidable in the French context to not overwhelm health care capacities. While the possibility of a booster campaign among elderly is being considered, scientific evidences on its potential benefit are lacking.
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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