On the reliability of predictions on Covid-19 dynamics: A systematic and critical review of modelling techniques

COVID-19 vaccines in patients with cancer

“… 2 There is, therefore, an urgent need to better understand the efficacy and safety of COVID-19 vaccines in immunosuppressed individuals, as recurrent exclusion of these and other vulnerable groups from ongoing studies of COVID-19 vaccines will result in imprecise predictive health models, which will in turn have consequences on successive waves of the pandemic. 3 …”

“…4 Errors in estimations, speculative assumptions, and extrapolations from data about other vaccines can have a substantial impact on current and successive pandemic waves, detrimentally affecting population health: at present, the data suggest that vulnerable individuals should be prioritised for an early (21-day) second dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine, to avoid exacerbating the pandemic threat. 3 , 6 , 7 This is a particularly sensitive issue as new variants of concern are being increasingly reported, with uncertainties about the efficacy of the currently available vaccines against these emerging strains. 9 Maximising vaccination efficacy and coverage is one way to tackle the emergence of variants of concern.…”

Adherence to COVID-19 vaccines in cancer patients: promote it and make it happen!

“…(1) Few data are available on efficacy and safety profiles of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in patients with cancer, resulting in imprecise predictive health models. (2,3) Recently has been reported a first analysis on efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in the a context of a prospective study enrolling patients and health care workers who received the RNA-based SARS-CoV-2 BNT162b2 vaccine ('BNT162b2'), with and without the boosting second dose at 3 weeks (4). At 3 weeks, 97% of health care workers had an immune response (anti-S IgG positive titers), with a single inoculum.…”

“…They have been excluded from the pivotal clinical trials for COVID19 vaccines despite included in the priority category for COVID19 vulnerability [ 1 ]. Few data are available on efficacy and safety profiles of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in patients with cancer, resulting in imprecise predictive health models [ 2 , 3 ]. Recently the first analysis has been reported on the efficacy of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine in the context of a prospective study enrolling patients and health care workers who received the RNA-based SARS-CoV-2 BNT162b2 vaccine ‘BNT162b2’, with and without the second booster dose at 3 weeks [ 4 ].…”

A Hybrid Modeling Technique of Epidemic Outbreaks with Application to COVID-19 Dynamics in West Africa

“…The importance of mathematical models in understanding and predicting the course of an epidemic outbreak and in assessing the impacts of public health control measures has been well documented in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic [ 15 , 35 , 36 , 37 ]. Whereas phenomenological modeling is limited in the scope of inference, compartmental modeling faces identifiability issues and is usually computationally intensive [ 38 ]. This study proposes a hybrid modeling framework which combines phenomenological and mechanistic modeling approaches to assess the dynamics of epidemic outbreaks while circumventing some of the limitations of each approach.…”