STUDY PROVES MASS CORONA VACCINATION IN SCHWAZ/TIROL VERY EFFECTIVE
An international network of researchers, including Salzburg economists Jörg Paetzold and Hannes Winner, was the first to study the effects of corona vaccines on the transmission of infections, hospitalisations and mutations in a real-life setting.
One year ago, the entire population of the Schwaz district in Tyrol were vaccinated. This unique experiment enabled researchers to estimate the causal effects of vaccination.
The analysis shows that the vaccination has had a significant effect. The study, in which the renowned virologist Dorothee von Laer (Meduni Innsbruck) and the highly respected vaccine researcher Florian Krammer (Mount Sinai Medical School, New York) were involved, was recently published in Nature Communications and selected by the NATURE group as one of the 50 most important Covid papers in the field of public health.
Vaccination coverage differences in Tyrol
A year ago, there was a worrying outbreak of the South African variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the district of Schwaz/Tyrol. As a result, 100,000 doses of the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine were made available for a mass vaccination campaign for the entire adult population of the district in March 2021. Schwaz became the first region in Europe to be vaccinated on such a large scale. 70 percent of the adult population was vaccinated within 5 days. This was in stark contrast to the slow progress of vaccination in the rest of the country, which at the time had a vaccination rate of around 10 percent.
The researchers used these large differences in vaccination coverage between otherwise well integrated regions to test the impact of the campaign on infection rates, new SARS-CoV-2 variants, and hospital and intensive care admissions. The results were published in Nature Communications on 1 February 2022.
Significant reduction in new SARS-CoV-2 infections
The researchers compared Schwaz with a control group comprising a selection of similar Austrian districts and with communities along the border of Schwaz excluded from the campaign. “These methods are particularly suitable for the identification of causal effects, as the work of the current Nobel Prize winners David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens shows,” emphasises Hannes Winner, Professor of Economics and Head of the newly founded Department of Economics at the Paris Lodron University of Salzburg (PLUS).
The study shows the rapid mass vaccination campaign was followed by a significant reduction in new SARS-CoV-2 infections of around 40 per cent compared to the control districts and around 70 per cent compared to the neighbouring municipalities within an observational period of two months. There were also similar reductions in variant cases.
“Our analysis also shows a significant reduction of hospital admissions and a 20 to 30 percent decrease in admissions to intensive care units,” says Jörg Paetzold, who is an associate professor in the PLUS Department of Economics and currently a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
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