Evaluating the direct effect of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe

Abstract

Across Europe, countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination. Evaluating the effectiveness of such interventions is of particular relevance to policy-makers. We leverage almost three years of available data across 38 European countries to evaluate the effectiveness of governmental responses in controlling the pandemic. We developed a Bayesian hierarchical model that flexibly relates daily COVID-19 incidence to past levels of vaccination and non-pharmaceutical interventions as summarised in the Stringency Index. Specifically, we use a distributed lag approach to temporally weight past intervention values, a tensor-product smooth to capture non-linearities and interactions between both types of interventions, and a hierarchical approach to parsimoniously address heterogeneity across countries. We identify a pronounced negative association between daily incidence and the strength of non-pharmaceutical interventions, along with substantial heterogeneity in effectiveness among European countries. Similarly, we observe a strong but more consistent negative association with vaccination levels. Our results show that non-linear interactions shape the effectiveness of interventions, with non-pharmaceutical interventions becoming less effective under high vaccination levels. Finally, our results indicate that the effects of interventions on daily incidence are most pronounced at a lag of 14 days after being in place. Our Bayesian hierarchical modelling approach reveals clear negative and lagged effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination on confirmed COVID-19 cases across European countries. As soon as COVID-19 hit Europe in early 2020, non-pharmaceutical interventions such as movement restrictions and social distancing were employed to contain the pandemic. Towards the end of 2020, vaccination was available and promoted as an additional defence. We analysed almost three years of public COVID-19 data to determine how effective both types of strategies were in containing the pandemic across 38 European countries. We developed a statistical model to relate confirmed cases to how strict non-pharmaceutical interventions were and to vaccination levels. Both non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination resulted in decreased confirmed cases, although variation exists among countries. When an intervention is applied, the effect on number of confirmed cases could be seen most about fourteen days after implementation. Fajgenblat et. al utilize almost three years of COVID-19 data to model consequences of interventions across Europe. They find that both non-pharmaceutical interventions and vaccination impact daily case rates, with the strongest effect at a lag of 14 days post-implementation.