A Probabilistic Description of the Impact of Vaccine-Induced Immunity in the Dynamics of COVID-19 Transmission

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 has caused millions of deaths worldwide and a huge societal and economic impact in virtually all countries. A large variety of mathematical models to describe the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission have been reported. Among them, Bayesian probabilistic models of COVID-19 transmission dynamics have been very efficient in the interpretation of early data from the beginning of the pandemic, helping to estimate the impact of non-pharmacological measures in each country, and forecasting the evolution of the pandemic in different potential scenarios. These models use probability distribution curves to describe key dynamic aspects of the transmission, like the probability for every infected person of infecting other individuals, dying or recovering, with parameters obtained from experimental epidemiological data. However, the impact of vaccine-induced immunity, which has been key for controlling the public health emergency caused by the pandemic, has been more challenging to describe in these models, due to the complexity of experimental data. Here we report different probability distribution curves to model the acquisition and decay of immunity after vaccination. We discuss the mathematical background and how these models can be integrated in existing Bayesian probabilistic models to provide a good estimation of the dynamics of COVID-19 transmission during the entire pandemic period.