Modelling long-term COVID-19 hospital admission dynamics using empirical immune protection waning data

Immune waning is key to the timely anticipation of COVID-19 long-term dynamics. We assess the impact of periodic vaccination campaigns using a compartmental epidemiological model with embedded multiple age structures and empiric time-dependent vaccine protection kinetics. Despite the uncertainty inherent to such scenarios, we show that vaccination campaigns decreases the yearly number of COVID-19 admissions. However, especially if restricted to individuals over 60 years old, vaccination on its own seems insufficient to prevent thousands of hospital admissions and it suffers the comparison with non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at decreasing infection transmission. The combination of such interventions and vaccination campaigns appear to provide the greatest reduction in hospital admissions.