Are we really vaccinating against the coronavirus as effectively as possible?

Ratio between first and second doses, percentage of inoculations on total deliveries, reduction of vaccinations on Sundays: does everything really work at its best?

(photo by V-3-8-N-1 / Pixabay) By now two months ago, it was December 27, the vaccination campaign against Sars-Cov-2 began. As of February 26, according to Agenas, 3.9 million doses of the vaccine have been administered and just under 1.4 million Italians who have received both the first injection and the booster. But is the Italian vaccination strategy really the most effective possible?

Before trying to answer, we need some context. Upon AIFA prescription, the national health system is required to make the recalls based on the deadlines indicated by the pharmaceutical companies and validated by the three phases of vaccine testing. In the UK, on ​​the other hand, the decision was made to postpone the booster, focusing only on the first dose. A strategy with respect to which Prime Minister Mario Draghi 's opening has also arrived in the last few hours.

Secondly, there is the problem relating to delays in vaccine deliveries, an issue that for several weeks has been creating a lively debate. And which, for obvious reasons, also ends up affecting the effectiveness of a vaccination campaign whose outcome is crucial to putting an end to the pandemic.

Having said all this, there are three elements on which our analysis has focused. Meanwhile, the trend of the administration curves of first and second doses, then the percentage of use of the three vaccines currently authorized in Italy (Pfizer / BioNtech, Moderna and AstraZeneca), and finally the proportion between vaccines performed and swabs processed. This is because the health personnel has not increased, indeed the calls to increase it have gone deserted. And therefore it is necessary to understand if vaccinations are slowing down the tamponade. Meanwhile, this emerges by comparing the trend of first and second doses.

body.isDesktop .tableauPlaceholder {height: auto! Important;} body.isDesktop .tableauWrapper iframe {height: auto! Important ;;}. TableauWrapper > p {line-height: 0; margin: 0! important;} The blue line represents the first doses of vaccine administered, the red one the second. While the gray bars indicate the total of inoculated doses on a daily basis (the simple sum of the number of first and second doses performed). As you can easily see, the two lines have substantially the same trend, with a time difference of three weeks. That is the 21 days after which it is necessary to carry out the booster.

This obviously means that for the first three weeks we proceeded with the first doses. After that, starting with the boosters, the number of first doses dropped and started rising again as the boosters ended. A trend which was probably also negatively affected by the supply crisis in mid-January, which led the then Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte to threaten a lawsuit against the manufacturing companies.

But net of the independent variable represented by supplies, could it have been more sensible, albeit counterintuitive, to start vaccinating at 50% of the system's capacity, to rise to 100% with the start of the boosters? In this way the number of people protected by at least one dose would steadily increase every day. Or is there a more effective model?

"This question makes perfect sense and raises an interesting problem: we are working on it and unfortunately we still don't have a result", explains Giuseppe Carlo Calafiore, full professor of Automatica at Department of Electronics and Telecommunications of the Polytechnic of Turin. "The answer to this question passes from the solution of a numerical problem", he continues: "what we are doing is building a model that predicts the evolution of the contagion, within a margin of error, for a certain number of weeks". It is a Sird model, an acronym that stands for Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered-Deceased, and is one of the models used in epidemiology to predict the progress of an epidemic.

“Within this model the number of vaccinated people who, after the recall, we consider no longer susceptible and that we eliminate from the count, enters as a control variable ”, says Calafiore. Then, the model is set "according to the criterion of reducing the population susceptible to infection to zero as quickly as possible" and an optimal control algorithm is used which determines, day by day, "the optimal number of vaccinations as a proportion of before and second dose, also based on the prediction of the available doses ".

A model, as mentioned, still under development. But which confirms that the strategy currently in place is not the only one possible. And, potentially, not even the most effective. Although, to establish with certainty, it will be necessary to wait for Calafiore's results.

In the meantime, there are at least two other considerations that can be made by analyzing the data relating to the vaccination campaign. The first is that not all vaccines are used in the same proportions. The situation is this:

body.isDesktop .tableauPlaceholder {height: auto! Important;} body.isDesktop .tableauWrapper iframe {height: auto! Important ;;}. TableauWrapper> p {line-height: 0; margin: 0! important;} The graph shows the percentage of vaccine doses inoculated on the total of those delivered. The filter at the bottom allows you to select a single region. As you can see, the use of AstraZeneca vials is much lower than that of the other two products.

It certainly has something to do with the fact that it was initially recommended for those under 55, although some day ago the limit went up to 65. And that phase two of vaccination, after health workers, involved the over 80s. But there are four regions in which, as we write and net of any delays in reporting data, not even a dose of the British vaccine has yet been injected. We are dealing with Basilicata, Emilia-Romagna, Umbria and the autonomous province of Trento.

Finally, there remains a problem, the same one that has been seen for a year now with tampons. That is the one linked to the fact that on Sundays we work in reduced ranks:

body.isDesktop .tableauPlaceholder {height: auto! Important;} body.isDesktop .tableauWrapper iframe {height: auto! Important ;;}. TableauWrapper > p {line-height: 0; margin: 0! important;} Meanwhile, good news: the need to commit health personnel to vaccinations (green line) is not reducing the ability to swab (gray line). It should be noted that the increase in the swabs in mid-January is due to the fact that the rapid antigenic ones were also included in the calculation.

On both curves there is a cyclical peak at the bottom which is repeated weekly. And it coincides with Sunday for vaccines and with Monday, when the results of those made the day before arrive, for swabs. In other words, one year after the outbreak of the pandemic, a way has not yet been found to guarantee, on the one hand, constant service throughout the week and, on the other, the right to rest for health professionals.

E this despite the fact that there were those who, like the president of Emilia Romagna Stefano Bonaccini, closely followed by the consultant of the Lombardy region Guido Bertolaso, said they were ready to vaccinate even at night. Announcements that for now, the data show, have remained so.

var divElement = document.getElementById ('viz1614335339368'); var vizElement = divElement.getElementsByTagName ('object') [0]; if (divElement.offsetWidth> 800) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '420px'; vizElement.style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else if (divElement.offsetWidth> 500) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '420px'; vizElement .style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else {vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.height = '527px';} var scriptElement = document.createElement ('script'); scriptElement.src = 'https://public.tableau.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js'; vizElement.parentNode.insertBefore (scriptElement, vizElement);

var divElement = document.getElementById ('viz1614339230848'); var vizElement = divElement.getElementsByTagName ('object') [0]; if (divElement.offsetWidth> 800) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '660px'; vizElement.style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else if (divElement.offsetWidth> 500) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '660px'; vizElement .style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else {vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.height = '527px';} var scriptElement = document.createElement ('script'); scriptElement.src = 'https://public.tableau.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js'; vizElement.parentNode.insertBefore (scriptElement, vizElement);

var divElement = document.getElementById ('viz1614339982533'); var vizElement = divElement.getElementsByTagName ('object') [0]; if (divElement.offsetWidth> 800) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '660px'; vizElement.style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else if (divElement.offsetWidth> 500) {vizElement.style.minWidth = '660px'; vizElement .style.maxWidth = '960px'; vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.minHeight = '587px'; vizElement.style.maxHeight = '607px'; vizElement.style.height = (divElement.offsetWidth * 0.75) + 'px';} else {vizElement.style.width = '100%'; vizElement.style.height = '527px';} var scriptElement = document.createElement ('script'); scriptElement.src = 'https://public.tableau.com/javascripts/api/viz_v1.js'; vizElement.parentNode.insertBefore (scriptElement, vizElement);


Finance - 1 hour ago

Italy wants to issue its first Green state

adsJSCode ("nativeADV1", [[2,1]], "true", "1"); Medicine - 3 hours ago

Why we start talking about the beginning of a third wave

adsJSCode ("nativeADV2", [[2,1]], "true", "2" ); Web - 4 hours ago

Microsoft opens a center in Milan to learn how to defend against cyber attacks

Topics

Coronavirus Italian Government Coronavirus numbers Vaccines vaccine AstraZeneca-Oxford Vaccine coronavirus Vaccine Moderna Vaccine Pfizer BioNTech globalData.fldTopic = "Coronavirus, Government, Italy, Coronavirus numbers, Vaccines, AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine, Coronavirus vaccine, Moderna Vaccine, Pfizer BioNTech vaccine"

You may also be interested in

This opera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu tion-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.