Nordic vaccination strategies face/off via age range comparative analysis on key indicators of COVID-19 severity and healthcare stress level

TL;DR

This study compares COVID-19 vaccination strategies across Nordic countries, analyzing their effects on infection rates, healthcare stress, and disease severity using statistical and mathematical modeling.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive comparative analysis of vaccination impacts on COVID-19 dynamics in Nordic countries employing novel statistical and epidemic modeling approaches.

Findings

Vaccines significantly reduce new COVID-19 cases.

Vaccination correlates with decreased healthcare stress.

Different age groups respond variably to vaccination strategies.

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the impact of vaccinations on spread of the COVID-19 virus for different age groups. More specifically we examine the deployment of vaccines in the Nordic countries in a comparative analysis where we analyze factors such as healthcare stress level and severity of disease through new infections, hospitalizations, intensive care unit (ICU) occupancy and deaths. Moreover, we analyze the impact of the various vaccine types, vaccination rate on the spread of the virus in each age group for Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden from the start of the vaccination period in December 2020 until the end of August 2021. We perform a three-fold analysis: i) frequency analysis of infections and vaccine rates by age groups, ii) rolling correlations between vaccination strategies, severity of COVID-19 and healthcare stress level and; iii) we also employ the epidemic Renormalization Group (eRG) framework. The latter is used to mathematically model wave structures, as well as the impact of vaccinations on wave dynamics. We further compare the Nordic countries with England. Our main results are the quantification of the impact of the vaccination campaigns on age groups epidemiological data, across countries with high vaccine uptake. The data clearly shows that vaccines markedly reduce the number of new cases and the risk of serious illness.