Impact of vaccinations, boosters and lockdowns on COVID-19 waves in French Polynesia

Chapman, Lloyd A. C. and Aubry, Maite and Maset, Noémie and Russell, Timothy W. and Knock, Edward S. and Lees, John A. and Mallet, Henri-Pierre and Cao-Lormeau, Van-Mai and Kucharski, Adam J. (2023) Impact of vaccinations, boosters and lockdowns on COVID-19 waves in French Polynesia. Nature Communications, 14 (1): 7330. ISSN 2041-1723

Abstract

Estimating the impact of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 incidence is complicated by several factors, including successive emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and changing population immunity from vaccination and infection. We develop an age-structured multi-strain COVID-19 transmission model and inference framework to estimate vaccination and non-pharmaceutical intervention impact accounting for these factors. We apply this framework to COVID-19 waves in French Polynesia and estimate that the vaccination programme averted 34.8% (95% credible interval: 34.5–35.2%) of 223,000 symptomatic cases, 49.6% (48.7–50.5%) of 5830 hospitalisations and 64.2% (63.1–65.3%) of 1540 hospital deaths that would have occurred in a scenario without vaccination up to May 2022. We estimate the booster campaign contributed 4.5%, 1.9%, and 0.4% to overall reductions in cases, hospitalisations, and deaths. Our results suggest that removing lockdowns during the first two waves would have had non-linear effects on incidence by altering accumulation of population immunity. Our estimates of vaccination and booster impact differ from those for other countries due to differences in age structure, previous exposure levels and timing of variant introduction relative to vaccination, emphasising the importance of detailed analysis that accounts for these factors.