Modeling transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron in China

作者：Jun Cai, Xiaowei Deng, Juan Yang, Kaiyuan Sun, Hengcong Liu, Zhiyuan Chen, Cheng Peng, Xinhua Chen, Qianhui Wu, Junyi Zou, Ruijia Sun, Wen Zheng, Zeyao Zhao, Wanying Lu, Yuxia Liang, Xiaoyu Zhou, Marco Ajelli, Hongjie Yu · 发表于：Nature Medicine · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.1038/s41591-022-01855-7 · 被引用次数：302 · 研究领域：SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research、COVID-19 epidemiological studies、COVID-19 Clinical Research Studies

Having adopted a dynamic zero-COVID strategy to respond to SARS-CoV-2 variants with higher transmissibility since August 2021, China is now considering whether, and for how long, this policy can remain in place. The debate has thus shifted towards the identification of mitigation strategies for minimizing disruption to the healthcare system in the case of a nationwide epidemic. To this aim, we developed an age-structured stochastic compartmental susceptible-latent-infectious-removed-susceptible model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission calibrated on the initial growth phase for the 2022 Omicron outbreak in Shanghai, to project COVID-19 burden (that is, number of cases, patients requiring hospitalization and intensive care, and deaths) under hypothetical mitigation scenarios. The model also considers age-specific vaccine coverage data, vaccine efficacy against different clinical endpoints, waning of immunity, different antiviral therapies and nonpharmaceutical interventions. We find that the level of immunity induced by the March 2022 vaccination campaign would be insufficient to prevent an Omicron wave that would result in exceeding critical care capacity with a projected intensive care unit peak demand of 15.6 times the existing capacity and causing approximately 1.55 million deaths. However, we also estimate that protecting vulnerable individuals by ensuring accessibility to vaccines and antiviral therapies, and maintaining implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions could be ...