Browsing by Subject "vaccine effectiveness"

Contacts between individuals play a central part in infectious disease modelling. Social or physical contacts are often determined through surveys. These types of contacts may not accurately represent the truly infectious contacts due to demographic differences in susceptibility and infectivity. In addition, surveyed data is prone to statistical biases and errors. For these reasons, a transmission model based on surveyed contact data may make predictions that are in conflict with real-life observations. The surveyed contact structure must be adjusted to improve the model and produce reliable predictions. The adjustment can be done in multiple different ways. We present five adjustment methods and study how the choice of method impacts a model’s predictions about vaccine effectiveness. The population is stratified into n groups. All five adjustment methods transform the surveyed contact matrix such that its normalised leading eigenvector (the model-predicted stable distribution of infections) matches the observed distribution of infections. The eigenvector method directly adjusts the leading eigenvector. It changes contacts antisymmetrically: if contacts from group i to group j increase, then contacts from j to i decrease, and vice versa. The susceptibility method adjusts the group-specific susceptibility of individuals. The changes in the contact matrix occur row-wise. Analogously, the infectivity method adjusts the group-specific infectivity; changes occur column-wise. The symmetric method adjusts susceptibility and infectivity in equal measure. It changes contacts symmetrically with respect to the main diagonal of the contact matrix. The parametrised weighting method uses a parameter 0 ≤ p ≤ 1 to weight the adjustment between susceptibility and infectivity. It is a generalisation of the susceptibility, infectivity and symmetric methods, which correspond to p = 0, p = 1 and p = 0.5, respectively. For demonstrative purposes, the adjustment methods were applied to a surveyed contact matrix and infection data from the COVID-19 epidemic in Finland. To measure the impact of the method on vaccination effectiveness predictions, the relative reduction of the basic reproduction number was computed for each method using Finnish COVID-19 vaccination data. We found that the eigenvector method has no impact on the relative reduction (compared to the unadjusted baseline case). As for the other methods, the predicted effectiveness of vaccination increased the more infectivity was weighted in the adjustment (that is, the larger the value of the parameter p). In conclusion, our study shows that the choice of adjustment method has an impact on model predictions, namely those about vaccination effectiveness. Thus, the choice should be considered when building infectious disease models. The susceptibility and symmetric methods seem the most natural choices in terms of contact structure. Choosing the ”optimal” method is a potential topic to explore in future research.