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“We need a combination of measures,” said Spector, who led the ZOE Covid research at King’s College London. “How high we want these rates to be is determined by our peace of mind and our relaxation of some rules last year that we thought was overkill, and now I think it’s insufficient this year.”
Nevertheless, vaccination rates are the most important factor explaining the difference between countries such as Croatia and Italy.
Many Eastern European countries have lower vaccination rates than some of their neighbors: Croatia, for example, is 46% fully vaccinated, Slovakia is 43%. (The European average is around 56%.) Austrian chancellor Alexander Schallenberg, while announcing the new curfew in his country, said that unvaccinated people triggered the increase in numbers: [daily infection] The rate is over 1700 in the unvaccinated and 383 in the vaccinated.
Where vaccination rates are higher, the result is less serious illness and death, even if transmission is high. In the UK, for example, 80% of people over the age of 12 have received two doses of the covid vaccine.
“The best performing countries are those with high vaccine coverage and effective measures,” says Salathé. “The worst countries are those that don’t have both. Most in between.”
But even if vaccination rates are high and case pressures relatively low, it may not be sufficient for long-term protection, especially given the fading effectiveness of vaccines over time.
“The UK started a vaccination program earlier than most countries and therefore experienced the impact of reduced immunity earlier,” says Michael Head, a senior research fellow in global health at the University of Southampton. “Supporters in the UK are clearly having an impact on hospital admissions and new cases in older populations.”
This continues to be vital to continuing to vaccinate people and boosting the immune response of those vaccinated early in the cycle.
“Where we see uncontrolled outbreaks, we also see new variants emerging of interest and concern, and we really don’t want new variants to dominate and have a greater impact on the efficacy of our vaccines,” he says. “Ultimately, the world cannot fully relax until the vast majority of the world is vaccinated. The combination of vaccine hesitancy and lack of access to vaccines is everyone’s problem.”
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