London, Europe Brief News – Unvaccinated people threaten the safety of people vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, suggests a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
“We’ve really tended to forget that we’re in a pandemic of a communicable disease, which means that our actions affect those around us,” Dr. David Fisman, the study’s coauthor and professor of epidemiology at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health said.
Published April 25, the study uses an infectious disease model based on the province of Ontario to reproduce the interactions between vaccinated and unvaccinated subpopulations in a mostly vaccinated population.
“We use models in a lot of different ways,” said further Fisman. “They’re just simplified versions of reality.”
This particular model, used different mixing techniques to understand how infection rates differ between those with and without the jab.
The models parameters included vaccine effectiveness, a baseline immunity in unvaccinated people and an infection recovery rate, among others.
Attack rates among those who are vaccinated against COVID-19 were highest when they were randomly mixed within the unvaccinated subpopulation.
“Humans do not mix randomly. (They) exhibit a tendency to interact preferentially with others like themselves, a phenomenon referred to as ‘assortativity,’” the research stated.
“People’s friends tend to be similar in age or people may hang out with the same sex. They may hang out with or attract more people from their own socioeconomic group, their own ethnic group,” said Fisman.
Attack rates were lowest for the unvaccinated
For the unvaccinated, attack rates were lowest when mixing amid the vaccinated subpopulation.
“When you have a lot of mixing between vaccinated and unvaccinated people, the risk for unvaccinated people actually goes down. However, vaccinated people become a buffer when you have a lot of mixing and risk in vaccinated people goes up.”
At this stage in the COVID-19, health officials have been promoting everyone to manage the virus “at their own risk.”
