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

Gros, Claudius, Czypionka, Thomas and Gros, Daniel (2022) When to end a lock down? How fast must vaccination campaigns proceed in order to keep health costs in check? Royal Society Open Science, 9 (1). p. 211055. ISSN 2054-5703

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://royalsocietypublishing.org/loi/rsos
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Authors
Divisions:	Health Policy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Date Deposited:	25 Feb 2022 17:09
Last Modified:	07 Apr 2024 22:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/113843

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