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?:abstract
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A novel coronavirus emerged in December of 2019 (COVID-19), causing a pandemic that continues to inflict unprecedented public health and economic burden in all nooks and corners of the world. Although the control of COVID-19 has largely focused on the use of basic public health measures (primarily based on using non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as quarantine, isolation, social-distancing, face mask usage and community lockdowns), a number of exceptionally-promising vaccines are about to be approved for use in humans by the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration. We present a new mathematical model for assessing the population-level impact of the candidate vaccines, particularly for the case where the vaccination program is complemented with a social-distancing control measure at a certain compliance level. The model stratifies the total population into two subgroups, based on whether or not they habitually wear face mask in public. The resulting multigroup model, which takes the form of a compartmental, deterministic system of nonlinear differential equations, is parametrized using COVID-19 cumulative mortality data. Conditions for the asymptotic stability of the associated disease-free equilibrium, as well as expression for the vaccine-derived herd immunity threshold, are derived. This study shows that the prospect of COVID-19 elimination using any of the three candidate vaccines is quite promising, and that such elimination is more feasible if the vaccination program is combined with social-distancing control measures (implemented at moderate to high level of compliance).
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