The importance of non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 vaccine rollout

PLoS Comput Biol. 2021 Sep 10;17(9):e1009346. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009346. eCollection 2021 Sep.

Abstract

The promise of efficacious vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 is fulfilled and vaccination campaigns have started worldwide. However, the fight against the pandemic is far from over. Here, we propose an age-structured compartmental model to study the interplay of disease transmission, vaccines rollout, and behavioural dynamics. We investigate, via in-silico simulations, individual and societal behavioural changes, possibly induced by the start of the vaccination campaigns, and manifested as a relaxation in the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions. We explore different vaccination rollout speeds, prioritization strategies, vaccine efficacy, as well as multiple behavioural responses. We apply our model to six countries worldwide (Egypt, Peru, Serbia, Ukraine, Canada, and Italy), selected to sample diverse socio-demographic and socio-economic contexts. To isolate the effects of age-structures and contacts patterns from the particular pandemic history of each location, we first study the model considering the same hypothetical initial epidemic scenario in all countries. We then calibrate the model using real epidemiological and mobility data for the different countries. Our findings suggest that early relaxation of safe behaviours can jeopardize the benefits brought by the vaccine in the short term: a fast vaccine distribution and policies aimed at keeping high compliance of individual safe behaviours are key to mitigate disease resurgence.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • COVID-19 Vaccines*
  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • COVID-19* / mortality
  • COVID-19* / prevention & control
  • COVID-19* / transmission
  • Computational Biology
  • Health Behavior
  • Humans
  • Immunization Programs*
  • Models, Biological
  • Pandemics

Substances

  • COVID-19 Vaccines

Grants and funding

NG acknowledges support from the DTA3/COFUND project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska Curie grant agreement No 801604. PB acknowledges support from Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.