Modeling the health impact of increasing vaccine coverage and nonpharmaceutical interventions against coronavirus disease 2019 in Ghana

ABSTRACT

Seroprevalence studies assessing community exposure to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in Ghana concluded that population-level immunity remained low as of February 2021. Thus, it is important to demonstrate how increasing vaccine coverage reduces the economic and public health impacts associated with SARS-CoV-2 transmission. To that end, this study used a Susceptible-Exposed-Presymptomatic-Symptomatic-Asymptomatic-Recovered-Dead-Vaccinated compartmental model to simulate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) transmission and the role of public health interventions in Ghana. The impact of increasing vaccination rates and decline in transmission rates due to nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on cumulative infections and deaths averted was explored under different scenarios. Latin hypercube sampling-partial rank correlation coefficient (LHS-PRCC) was used to investigate the uncertainty and sensitivity of the outcomes to the parameters. Simulation results suggest that increasing the vaccination rate to achieve 50% coverage was associated with almost 60,000 deaths and 25 million infections averted. In comparison, a 50% decrease in the transmission coefficient was associated with the prevention of about 150,000 deaths and 50 million infections. The LHS-PRCC results indicated that in the context of vaccination rate, cumulative infections and deaths averted were most sensitive to vaccination rate, waning immunity rates from vaccination, and waning immunity from natural infection. This study’s findings illustrate the impact of increasing vaccination coverage and/or reducing the transmission rate by NPI adherence in the prevention of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Ghana.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• epidemiological models
• epidemiology
• models, theoretical
• nonpharmaceutical interventions
• SARS-CoV-2
• vaccination

Disclosure statement

SKO declares that she was a paid intern at Ionis Pharmaceuticals, and the financial relationship did not affect the article’s content. BJC declares that he was a consultant for Roche and Sanofi Pasteur. ICHF declares that he serves as a consultant for Merck, Inc. All other co-authors declare no competing interest.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/20477724.2024.2313787

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.