Indianapolis: More than 200 million people in the US have received at least one dose of the anti-Covid-19 vaccine in the hope that it will reduce the rate of spread of infection and save lives. Researchers have learned about the effectiveness of the vaccine from large-scale clinical trials.
In studies, the vaccines were found to be very effective in preventing serious illness from Covid-19 and especially in preventing death. In the real world, however, it is important to explore any new treatments because the population-level benefits of vaccines may differ from the effectiveness found in clinical trials.
For example, some people in the US took only one dose of the vaccine, which means they are less protected than a person who took both doses. Similarly, people taking the vaccine dose are less likely to spread the Covid-19 infection, while those who are not vaccinated are more likely to spread it. This allows vaccines to be found more effective at the population level than in clinical trials.
I am a health economist and my team and I are studying the impact of vaccination on the epidemic. We wanted to know how many lives could be saved by the vaccines due to the anti-Covid-19 vaccination campaign run by the states in the US.
In March 2021, when weekly data on the state’s COVID-19 vaccinations began to arrive, my team began analyzing the state’s vaccination rates, as well as the relationship between COVID-19 cases and deaths in each state. Our goal was to create a model that is sufficient to measure the effectiveness of vaccination. To do this, our model compared the cases of COVID-19 in states with high vaccination rates to states with low vaccination rates.
As part of this analysis, we explored the factors that are responsible for the spread of the coronavirus such as differences in weather and population of each state, social behavior and orders, and social behavior such as staying at home, wearing masks, and closing business establishments. Changes due to weather in
We also looked at how long it took between a person’s first dose of vaccine and their immune system creating protection. To find out the potential of our model, we first compared the number of deaths due to infection and the number of deaths our model had predicted.
Our model had estimated 5,69,193 deaths due to coronavirus in the US by May 9, 2021, while 5,78,862 patients had died till that date, a difference of two percent less than our model’s estimate.
Using data from the state’s vaccination rates, we found that 7,08,586 people would have died by May 9, 2021, while 5,69,193 people had died by then due to the non-availability of doses. Our draft shows that vaccines have saved 140,000 lives as of May 9, 2021.
In our study, data from a few months after the start of vaccination has been studied. I can firmly say that since then vaccines have saved many more lives.
