Effectiveness of vaccination and quarantine policies to curb the spread of COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper develops a compartmental model to evaluate the combined effects of vaccination and quarantine policies on COVID-19 spread, providing data-driven insights for effective pandemic management.

Contribution

It introduces the SVEIQR model incorporating vaccination and quarantine, with parameters estimated from Seoul data, to analyze policy impacts on COVID-19 transmission.

Findings

Model confirms the effectiveness of combined vaccination and quarantine strategies.

Quantitative results suggest optimal policy parameter adjustments.

Model provides guidelines for pandemic policy making.

Abstract

A pandemic, the worldwide spread of a disease, can threaten human beings from the social as well as biological perspectives and paralyze existing living habits. To stave off the more devastating disaster and return to a normal life, people make tremendous efforts at multiscale levels from individual to worldwide: paying attention to hand hygiene, developing social policies such as wearing masks, social distancing, quarantine, and inventing vaccines and remedy. Regarding the current severe pandemic, namely the coronavirus disease 2019, we explore the spreading-suppression effect when adopting the aforementioned efforts. Especially the quarantine and vaccination are considered since they are representative primary treatments for block spreading and prevention at the government level. We establish a compartment model consisting of susceptible (S), vaccination (V), exposed (E), infected (I), quarantined (Q), and recovered (R) compartments, called SVEIQR model. We look into the infected cases in Seoul and consider three kinds of vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca. The values of the relevant parameters are obtained from empirical data from Seoul and clinical data for vaccines and estimated by Bayesian inference. After confirming that our SVEIQR model is plausible, we test the various scenarios by adjusting the associated parameters with the quarantine and vaccination policies around the current values. The quantitative result obtained from our model could suggest a guideline for policy making on effective vaccination and social policies.