Researchers: Moshe Leshno ¹, Ella Sklan ¹, Amir Shlomai ^1,2

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was declared in March 2020 and since then many countries have tried to deal with the rapid spread of the virus using various strategies including general lockdown, lockdown of specific populations, lockdown of infected individuals and their contacts, and various social distance measures. The development of efficient vaccines has added a major tool to the arsenal available to policymakers.

Objectives: The aim of our study was to measure the cost-effectiveness of these tools calculated using the number of deaths and the economic costs of the various strategies. Our goal was to find the most effective strategies in light of the changing conditions defined by the changes in the virus and the available mitigation tools.

Method: A modified Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, Recovered (SEIR) model was employed to assess the situation. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of these strategies as well as the expected number of infected individuals and deaths were calculated.

Findings: Vaccination was found to be more significantly more cost-effective than lockdown. Adding some restrictions (partial lockdown) will reduce the associated costs will save lives compared to high levels of population vaccination.

Conclusions: Our developed model is not adapted to the variants that have evolved in recent months. These variants may be more infectious, cause more severe disease and escape from the vaccine, thus affecting the model.

Recommendations: Since our main finding is that vaccination is more cost-effective, we recommend that most policymakers' efforts should focus on increasing the number of vaccinated individuals and keeping the vaccination program up to date. If the effectiveness of the vaccine decreases, it will be necessary to increase the number of vaccinees or add additional restrictions accordingly.

Research end date: 12/2021