Simulation based adaptive vaccine delivery strategy

ABSTRACT

Inoculation is one of the most common intervention methods to mitigate the number of incidents during an outbreak. It is a crucial point to decide which age or target groups in a society are priorly vaccinated. In this study, we considered this challenge and a late vaccine distribution scenario with a new vaccine delivery strategy. A given population is divided into five age groups with different contact and transmission rates. The proposed strategy distributes weekly shots to people in an age group or groups according to results of simulation modelling different vaccination strategies for a week time horizon by considering historical incident rates of the outbreak. The method is tested against the strategy of vaccinating schoolchildren considered in many related publications in the literature. According to results, for 20 scenarios based on different contact and transmission rates and under three coverage levels, our method outperforms the benchmark strategy under 20% and 30% coverage levels for each scenario. Both strategies mostly follow same distributions and come up with same results under 10% coverage level. We can conclude that the proposed method is robust to changes in contact and transmission rates and provides superior results when coverage levels are relatively high. The method can provide effective vaccination strategies by considering disease dynamics for primarily COVID-19 and future pandemics. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR]