Analysis of key factors of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccination program: A mathematical modeling approach

Abstract

The administration of vaccines against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) just 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 future 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 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 in increasing the vaccine inoculation pace and create awareness in the population about the importance of COVID-19 vaccines.

Impact of a New SARS-CoV-2 Variant on the Population: A Mathematical Modeling Approach

“…Further studies are needed to know the immunity period. In addition, we consider a short time period (1 year) since we expect that after one year all the countries would have a fully developed vaccination program, and another model that includes vaccination would be necessary [106,108,116].…”

Impact of a new SARS-CoV-2 variant on the population: A mathematical modeling approach

“…This assumption is reasonable but may change if the number of cases and deaths increase dramatically due to the new SARS-CoV-2 variant. It is important to mention that in countries where a vaccination program is advancing quickly it is necessary to construct another model that considers the vaccinated population [95, 27, 53, 28, 82]. In addition, if the behavior of the people changes it would be more realistic to include time-varying transmissibility, which has been used to study other infectious diseases [131, 72, 68, 62, 28].…”

“…Further studies are needed to know the immunity period. In addition, we consider a short time period (1 year) since we expect that after one year all the countries would have a fully developed vaccination program, and another model that includes vaccination would be necessary [82, 53, 95, 120].…”

Sensitivity and Optimal Control Analysis of an Extended SEIR COVID‐19 Mathematical Model

“…e vaccinees are considered to have acquired partial immunity against COVID-19 subject to the type of vaccine (efficacy level) administered to an individual. e transmission coe cient of the vaccinees, β 1 < β since the vaccinees are assumed to have acquired a vaccine-induced immunity [27,28]. e rate at which exposed individuals become infectious is denoted by ε. e rates of natural and disease-induced mortality are μ and δ, respectively.…”