Infection Fatality Rate and Infection Attack Rate of COVID-19 in South American Countries
Abstract Background: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic hit South America badly with two waves. Different COVID-19 variants have been storming across the region, leading to more severe infections and deaths even in places with high vaccination coverages.Methods: We use the start-of-the-art iterated filtering likelihood-based inference disease modelling framework. We modify the classical susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered model with a time-varying transmission rate, and additional delayed class and vaccinations to reported COVID-19 deaths in 12 South American countries with the highest COVID-19 mortalities. Results: We yield biologically reasonable estimates for the infection fatality rate (IFR), the infection attack rate (IAR) and time-varying transmission rate. We observe that the severity, the dynamical patterns of the deaths and the time-varying transmission rates among the countries are highly heterogeneous. Further, our analysis of the model with vaccination highlights that increasing the vaccination rate could effectively suppress the pandemics in South America.Conclusion: This study reveals the possible mechanism behind the two waves of COVID-19 in South America. We observe reductions in the transmission rate corresponding to each wave plausibly due to improvement in nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) measures and human protective behavior reaction to recent deaths. Thus, strategies coupling social distancing and vaccination could substantially suppress the mortality rate of COVID-19 in South America.