Modelling the impact of vaccination on the COVID-19 pandemic in African countries

TL;DR

This study models the impact of COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in African countries using an extended epidemiological model, showing that increased vaccination significantly reduces death rates despite ongoing infection waves.

Contribution

Introduces the SIDARTHE-V model incorporating vaccination effects and applies it to multiple African countries to quantify vaccination impact on COVID-19 severity.

Findings

Vaccination campaigns significantly reduced death rates.

Infection rates sometimes increased with new waves.

Death rates remained low despite infection surges.

Abstract

The rapid development of vaccines to combat the spread of COVID-19 disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a great scientific achievement. Before the development of the COVID-19 vaccines, most studies capitalized on the available data that did not include pharmaceutical measures. Such studies focused on the impact of non-pharmaceutical measures (e.g social distancing, sanitation, wearing of face masks, and lockdown) to study the spread of COVID-19. In this study, we used the SIDARTHE-V model which is an extension of the SIDARTHE model wherein we include vaccination roll outs. We studied the impact of vaccination on the severity (deadly nature) of the virus in African countries. Model parameters were extracted by fitting simultaneously the COVID-19 cumulative data of deaths, recoveries, active cases, and full vaccinations reported by the governments of Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia. With countries having some degree of variation in their vaccination programs, we considered the impact of vaccination campaigns on the death rates in these countries. The study showed that the cumulative death rates declined drastically with the increased extent of vaccination in each country; while infection rates were sometimes increasing with the arrival of new waves, the death rates did not increase as we saw before vaccination.