Fig. 4

Relative disease burden of SARS-CoV-2 under different counterfactual mitigation scenarios in mainland China. Assuming the hypothetical situation that China have transitioned from SARS-CoV-2 containment to mitigation, we estimated the SARS-CoV-2 disease burden under different vaccine coverage and antiviral uptake levels. We consider SASR-CoV-2 BA.2 as the baseline variant but also consider two hypothetical variants with increased disease severity/enhanced immune evasion properties relative to BA.2. The detail definition for each scenario is listed in Additional file 1: Table S5. The overall disease burden is measured in total number of deaths in mainland China. We consider the reference scenario as reopening the country with Omicron BA.2 introduced to mainland China under the vaccination coverage on March 17, 2022 and with no antiviral uptake. We provide relative disease burden of each scenario comparing to that of the reference scenario based on the lower bound projections estimated from a statistical model (detailed in Methods section) based on the outcome the Omicron wave in Hong Kong SAR, China. The results of the upper bound projections are shown in Additional file 1: Fig. S5, as a sensitivity analysis