Frailty variation models for susceptibility and exposure to SARS-CoV-2
Gomes, M. G. M.; Ferreira, M. U.; Chikina, M.; Pegden, W.; Aguas, R.
Show abstract
Individual variation in susceptibility and exposure is subject to selection by force of infection, accelerating the natural acquisition of immunity, and reducing herd immunity thresholds and epidemic final sizes. This is a manifestation of a wider population phenomenon known as "frailty variation" in demography. Despite this theoretical understanding, public health policies continue to be guided by mathematical models that leave out most of the relevant variation and as a result inflate projected infection burdens. Here we focus on the trajectories of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic in England and Scotland. We fit models to series of daily deaths and estimate relevant epidemiological parameters, including coefficients of variation which we find in agreement with direct measurements based on published contact surveys. Our estimates are robust to whether the data series encompass one or two pandemic waves. We conclude that herd immunity thresholds are being reached with a larger contribution of vaccination in Scotland than in England, where naturally acquired immunity is higher. These results are relevant to global vaccination policies.
Matching journals
The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Uncertainty and error in SARS-CoV-2 epidemiological parameters inferred from population-level epidemic models 98%
- How optimal allocation of limited testing capacity changes epidemic dynamics 95%
- Stages of COVID-19 pandemic and paths to herd immunity by vaccination: dynamical model comparing Austria, Luxembourg and Sweden 95%
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
- Roles of generation-interval distributions in shaping relative epidemic strength, speed, and control of new SARS-CoV-2 variants 96%
- Estimating epidemic dynamics with genomic and time series data 96%
- Vaccination strategies when vaccines are scarce: On conflicts between reducing the burden and avoiding the evolution of escape mutants 96%
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.