When to end a lock down? How fast must vaccination campaigns proceed in order to keep health costs in check?

TL;DR

This paper presents simple guidelines for vaccination rates needed to safely relax non-pharmaceutical interventions during COVID-19, emphasizing protecting the elderly to minimize health costs.

Contribution

It introduces easy-to-apply rules of thumb for vaccination speed to balance health risks and intervention relaxation during the pandemic.

Findings

Vaccination rates should exceed twice the growth rate of cases to prevent death rate increase.

To control hospital pressure, vaccination must be about four times the case growth rate.

Focusing on vaccinating over 60-year-olds greatly reduces potential life loss.

Abstract

We propose a simple rule of thumb for countries which have embarked on a vaccination campaign while still facing the need to keep non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) in place because of the ongoing spread of SARS-CoV-2. If the aim is to keep the death rate from increasing, NPIs can be loosened when it is possible to vaccinate more than twice the growth rate of new cases. If the aim is to keep the pressure on hospitals under control, the vaccination rate has to be about four times higher. These simple rules can be derived from the observation that the risk of death or a severe course requiring hospitalization from a COVID-19 infection increases exponentially with age and that the sizes of age cohorts decrease linearly at the top of the population pyramid. Protecting the over 60-year-olds, which constitute approximately one-quarter of the population in Europe (and most OECD countries), reduces the potential loss of life by 95 percent.