Analysis of Key Factors of a SARS-CoV-2 Vaccination Program: A Mathematical Modeling Approach

  1. David Martínez-Rodríguez
  2. Gilberto Gonzalez-Parra
  3. Rafael-J. Villanueva

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Abstract

The administration of vaccines against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in early December of 2020. Currently, there are only a few approved vaccines, each with different efficacies and mechanisms of action. Moreover, vaccination programs in different regions may vary due to differences in implementation, for instance, simply the availability of the vaccine. In this article, we study the impact of the pace of vaccination and the intrinsic efficacy of the vaccine on prevalence, hospitalizations, and deaths related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Then we study different potential scenarios regarding the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic in the near future. We construct a compartmental mathematical model and use computational methodologies to study these different scenarios. Thus, we are able to identify some key factors to reach the aims of the vaccination programs. We use some metrics related to the outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to assess the impact of the efficacy of the vaccine and the pace of the vaccine inoculation. We found that both factors have a high impact on the outcomes. However, the rate of vaccine administration has a higher impact in reducing the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic. This result shows that health institutions need to focus on increasing the vaccine inoculation pace and create awareness in the population about the importance of COVID-19 vaccines.

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  1. Version published to 10.3390/epidemiologia2020012
  2. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2021.02.19.21252095: (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

    Antibodies
    SentencesResources
    For example, in a study of 56 patients recovered from SARS it was found that the neutralizing and IgG antibodies quickly declined after 16 months and continued to decline further to a very low level after 3 years [143].
    IgG
    suggested: None

    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:
    In addition, there is a potential limitation of the total coverage due to the relctance of some parts of the population who have been influenced by doubting the science or by pressure from anti-vaccination groups [27, 53, 108, 137]. Our results also show that the impact of a COVID-19 vaccination program is highly dependent on the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission rates and these affect the effective reproductive number ℛt of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Thus, it is important to educate the population about the importance of maintaining non-pharmaceutical control interventions such as the use of facial masks and physical distancing [30, 40, 73, 84, 110]. Furthermore, the additional benefit of a vaccine with 80% or 94% efficacy depends on the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission rate as has been observed in this study. When we have low SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission rates (equivalently: lower effective reproductive number) the vaccine with 80% efficacy has a smaller impact on the COVID disease related metrics in comparison with a scenario with a high SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission rate (equivalently higher effective reproductive number). Thus, even with a highly effective vaccine it is important to maintain as low as possible the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmission rate to reduce the burden of the current pandemic. Moreover, if the immunity against the SARS-CoV-2 virus diminishes over the time, then lowering transmission rates is even more crucial. The constructed compartmental model is a SEIR type but ...

    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.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2021.02.19.21252095v1 on medRxiv