A study on the effects of containment policies and vaccination on the spread of SARS-CoV-2

This paper presents a method to predict the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 in a population with a known age-structure, and then, to quantify the effects of various containment policies, including those policies that affect each age-group differently. The model itself is a compartmental model in which each compartment is divided into a number of age-groups. The parameters of the model are estimated using an optimisation scheme and some known results from the theory of monotone systems such that the model output agrees with some collected data on the spread of SARS-CoV-2. To highlight the strengths of this framework, a few case studies are presented in which different populations are subjected to different containment strategies. They include cases in which the containment policies switch between scenarios with different levels of severity. Then a case study on herd immunity due to vaccination is presented. And then it is shown how we can use this framework to optimally distribute a limited number of vaccine units in a given population to maximise their impact and reduce the total number of infectious individuals.