  The rapid development of vaccines to combat the spread of COVID-19 disease
caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a great scientific achievement. Before the
development of the COVID-19 vaccines, most studies capitalized on the available
data that did not include pharmaceutical measures. Such studies focused on the
impact of non-pharmaceutical measures (e.g social distancing, sanitation,
wearing of face masks, and lockdown) to study the spread of COVID-19. In this
study, we used the SIDARTHE-V model which is an extension of the SIDARTHE model
wherein we include vaccination roll outs. We studied the impact of vaccination
on the severity (deadly nature) of the virus in African countries. Model
parameters were extracted by fitting simultaneously the COVID-19 cumulative
data of deaths, recoveries, active cases, and full vaccinations reported by the
governments of Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Togo, and
Zambia. With countries having some degree of variation in their vaccination
programs, we considered the impact of vaccination campaigns on the death rates
in these countries. The study showed that the cumulative death rates declined
drastically with the increased extent of vaccination in each country; while
infection rates were sometimes increasing with the arrival of new waves, the
death rates did not increase as we saw before vaccination.
