TY - JOUR
T1 - Incorporating the mutational landscape of SARS-COV-2 variants and case-dependent vaccination rates into epidemic models
AU - Chowdhury, Mohammad Mihrab
AU - Islam, Md Rafiul
AU - Hossain, Md Sakhawat
AU - Tabassum, Nusrat
AU - Peace, Angela
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), which began as a small outbreak in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, became a global pandemic within months due to its high transmissibility. In the absence of pharmaceutical treatment, various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of COVID-19 brought the entire world to a halt. After almost a year of seemingly returning to normalcy with the world's quickest vaccine development, the emergence of more infectious and vaccine resistant coronavirus variants is bringing the situation back to where it was a year ago. In the light of this new situation, we conducted a study to portray the possible scenarios based on the three key factors: impact of interventions (pharmaceutical and NPIs), vaccination rate, and vaccine efficacy. In our study, we assessed two of the most crucial factors, transmissibility and vaccination rate, in order to reduce the spreading of COVID-19 in a simple but effective manner. In order to incorporate the time-varying mutational landscape of COVID-19 variants, we estimated a weighted transmissibility composed of the proportion of existing strains that naturally vary over time. Additionally, we consider time varying vaccination rates based on the number of daily new cases. Our method for calculating the vaccination rate from past active cases is an effective approach in forecasting probable future scenarios as it actively tracks people's attitudes toward immunization as active case changes. Our simulations show that if a large number of individuals cannot be vaccinated by ensuring high efficacy in a short period of time, adopting NPIs is the best approach to manage disease transmission with the emergence of new vaccine breakthrough and more infectious variants.
AB - Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19), which began as a small outbreak in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, became a global pandemic within months due to its high transmissibility. In the absence of pharmaceutical treatment, various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of COVID-19 brought the entire world to a halt. After almost a year of seemingly returning to normalcy with the world's quickest vaccine development, the emergence of more infectious and vaccine resistant coronavirus variants is bringing the situation back to where it was a year ago. In the light of this new situation, we conducted a study to portray the possible scenarios based on the three key factors: impact of interventions (pharmaceutical and NPIs), vaccination rate, and vaccine efficacy. In our study, we assessed two of the most crucial factors, transmissibility and vaccination rate, in order to reduce the spreading of COVID-19 in a simple but effective manner. In order to incorporate the time-varying mutational landscape of COVID-19 variants, we estimated a weighted transmissibility composed of the proportion of existing strains that naturally vary over time. Additionally, we consider time varying vaccination rates based on the number of daily new cases. Our method for calculating the vaccination rate from past active cases is an effective approach in forecasting probable future scenarios as it actively tracks people's attitudes toward immunization as active case changes. Our simulations show that if a large number of individuals cannot be vaccinated by ensuring high efficacy in a short period of time, adopting NPIs is the best approach to manage disease transmission with the emergence of new vaccine breakthrough and more infectious variants.
KW - Break-through variants
KW - Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)
KW - Reinfection
KW - Vaccination rate
KW - Waning immunity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85127264987&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.idm.2022.02.003
DO - 10.1016/j.idm.2022.02.003
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85127264987
SN - 2468-0427
VL - 7
SP - 75
EP - 82
JO - Infectious Disease Modelling
JF - Infectious Disease Modelling
IS - 2
ER -