Modeling Vaccine Efficacy for COVID-19 Outbreak in New York City

SIMPLE SUMMARY: This article aims to study the COVID-19 data for New York City. We use both the daily number of second dose vaccination and the daily number of reported cases for New York City. This article provides a method to combine an epidemic model and such data. We explore the influence of vaccine efficacy on our results. ABSTRACT: In this article we study the efficacy of vaccination in epidemiological reconstructions of COVID-19 epidemics from reported cases data. Given an epidemiological model, we developed in previous studies a method that allowed the computation of an instantaneous transmission rate that produced an exact fit of reported cases data of the COVID-19 outbreak. In this article, we improve the method by incorporating vaccination data. More precisely, we develop a model in which vaccination is variable in its effectiveness. We develop a new technique to compute the transmission rate in this model, which produces an exact fit to reported cases data, while quantifying the efficacy of the vaccine and the daily number of vaccinated. We apply our method to the reported cases data and vaccination data of New York City.