Germany's fourth COVID-19 wave was mainly driven by the unvaccinated.

ABSTRACT:

Background

While the majority of the German population was fully vaccinated at the time (about 65%), COVID-19 incidence started growing exponentially in October 2021 with about 41% of recorded new cases aged twelve or above being symptomatic breakthrough infections, presumably also contributing to the dynamics. So far, it remained elusive how significant this contribution was and whether targeted non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) may have stopped the amplification of the crisis.

Methods

We develop and introduce a contribution matrix approach based on the next-generation matrix of a population-structured compartmental infectious disease model to derive contributions of respective inter- and intragroup infection pathways of unvaccinated and vaccinated subpopulations to t

SUBMITTER: Maier BF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9481603 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature