Jung Sung-Mok, Jung Jaehun, Lessler Justin
From the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC.
Department of Preventive Medicine, Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Epidemiology. 2025 May 1;36(3):334-343. doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000001846. Epub 2025 Feb 3.
Public health and social measures are crucial for controlling the spread of pathogens. However, well-tailored assessments of their impact remain elusive, particularly considering time-varying immunity established from prior exposures and its waning.
We developed a mathematical model to estimate the time-varying basic reproduction number, accounting for the dynamics of underlying immunity. Applying this framework, we retrospectively assessed the impact of public health and social measures implemented from November 2021 to April 2022 on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Korea and discussed potential biases from ignoring underlying immunity.
Our proposed model estimated a notable attenuation in the impact of public health on social measures on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in Korea with the emergence of the Omicron variants while remaining effective throughout the Delta and Omicron periods. These changes during the Omicron period became evident only upon adjusting for underlying immunity and were correlated with observed human mobility patterns in Korea.
Our findings support the importance of incorporating underlying immunity in evaluating public health and social measures, particularly in the presence of substantial changes over a short period, such as widespread infections or vaccination. This model would stand as a tool for informing public health planning, capable of mitigating the overall disease burden in future epidemics.
公共卫生和社会措施对于控制病原体传播至关重要。然而，对其影响进行精心定制的评估仍然难以实现，尤其是考虑到先前接触所建立的随时间变化的免疫力及其衰退情况。
我们开发了一个数学模型来估计随时间变化的基本繁殖数，同时考虑潜在免疫力的动态变化。应用这个框架，我们回顾性评估了2021年11月至2022年4月在韩国实施的公共卫生和社会措施对新冠病毒传播的影响，并讨论了忽略潜在免疫力可能产生的偏差。
我们提出的模型估计，随着奥密克戎变种的出现，公共卫生和社会措施对韩国新冠病毒传播的影响显著减弱，而在整个德尔塔和奥密克戎时期仍然有效。奥密克戎时期的这些变化只有在调整潜在免疫力后才变得明显，并且与韩国观察到的人类流动模式相关。
我们的研究结果支持在评估公共卫生和社会措施时纳入潜在免疫力的重要性，特别是在短期内出现重大变化的情况下，如广泛感染或接种疫苗。该模型将作为一种为公共卫生规划提供信息的工具，能够减轻未来疫情中的总体疾病负担。
