With the pandemic coming to an end and new vaccines now available, focus is shifting from containing the disease to vaccinating as many people as possible. The vaccine rollout is a massive undertaking that involves coordinating many different stakeholders, including government partners, community organizations, businesses, private health insurance companies, pharmacies and the public at large.
The vaccines are distributed through various channels that require significant coordination and investment, including mass vaccination sites with walk-in capabilities for all ages, community engagement events, neighborhood canvassing efforts and social media outreach. The goal is to reach as many people as possible with one dose of the vaccine, which can be a difficult task in large cities with limited infrastructure and strained resources.
Aside from logistical challenges, a major challenge is prioritising which population groups to vaccinate first, and how. In the initial phase of the vaccine rollout, priority is given to frontline workers, older adults and individuals with underlying medical conditions that put them at greater risk of infection or suffering severe symptoms.
Numerous modelling works have focused on how to allocate COVID-19 vaccines in order to reduce the number of fatalities (Bertsimas et al, 2020; Bubar et al, 2021; Buckner et al, 2021; Chen et al, 2020; Hogan et al, 2020; Matrajt et al, 2021). Prioritising groups with high daily person-to-person interactions appears to result in substantial reductions in total deaths compared with no prioritisation when the daily vaccination rollout rate is fast and when children are eligible for vaccination (up to 40% fewer). When the daily vaccine rollout rates is slow and when children are not eligible, however, prioritising groups with low interaction levels still results in significant reductions in total deaths (up to 10% fewer) when comparing with no prioritisation.
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