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Register a new userStrategic Spatiotemporal Vaccine Distribution Increases the Survival Rate in an Infectious Disease like Covid-19
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Covid-19 has caused hundred of thousands of deaths and an economic damage amounting to trillions of dollars, creating a desire for the rapid development of vaccine. Once available, vaccine is gradually produced, evoking the question on how to distribute it best. While official vaccination guidelines largely focus on the question to whom vaccines should be provided first (e.g. to risk groups), here we propose a strategy for their distribution in time and space, which sequentially prioritizes regions with a high local infection growth rate. To demonstrate this strategy, we develop a simple statistical model describing the time-evolution of infection patterns and their response to vaccination, for infectious diseases like Covid-19. For inhomogeneous infection patterns, locally well-mixed populations and basic reproduction numbers $R_0sim 1.5-4$ the proposed strategy at least halves the number of deaths in our simulations compared to the standard practice of distributing vaccines proportionally to the population density. For $R_0sim 1$ we still find a significant increase of the survival rate. The proposed vaccine distribution strategy can be further tested in detailed modelling works and could excite discussions on the importance of the spatiotemporal distribution of vaccines for official guidelines.
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Vaccination against COVID-19 with the recently approved mRNA vaccines BNT162b2 (BioNTech/Pfizer) and mRNA-1273 (Moderna) is currently underway in a large number of countries. However, high incidence rates and rapidly spreading SARS-CoV-2 variants are concerning. In combination with acute supply deficits in Europe in early 2021, the question arises of whether stretching the vaccine, for instance by delaying the second dose, can make a significant contribution to preventing deaths, despite associated risks such as lower vaccine efficacy, the potential emergence of escape mutants, enhancement, waning immunity, reduced social acceptance of off-label vaccination, and liability shifts. A quantitative epidemiological assessment of risks and benefits of non-standard vaccination protocols remains elusive. To clarify the situation and to provide a quantitative epidemiological foundation we develop a stochastic epidemiological model that integrates specific vaccine rollout protocols into a risk-group structured infectious disease dynamical model. Using the situation and conditions in Germany as a reference system, we show that delaying the second vaccine dose is expected to prevent deaths in the four to five digit range, should the incidence resurge. We show that this considerable public health benefit relies on the fact that both mRNA vaccines provide substantial protection against severe COVID-19 and death beginning 12 to 14 days after the first dose. The benefits of protocol change are attenuated should vaccine compliance decrease substantially. To quantify the impact of protocol change on vaccination adherence we performed a large-scale online survey. We find that, in Germany, changing vaccination protocols may lead to small reductions in vaccination intention. In sum, we therefore expect the benefits of a strategy change to remain substantial and stable.
We present a new mathematical model to explicitly capture the effects that the three restriction measures: the lockdown date and duration, social distancing and masks, and, schools and border closing, have in controlling the spread of COVID-19 infections $i(r, t)$. Before restrictions were introduced, the random spread of infections as described by the SEIR model grew exponentially. The addition of control measures introduces a mixing of order and disorder in the systems evolution which fall under a different mathematical class of models that can eventually lead to critical phenomena. A generic analytical solution is hard to obtain. We use machine learning to solve the new equations for $i(r,t)$, the infections $i$ in any region $r$ at time $t$ and derive predictions for the spread of infections over time as a function of the strength of the specific measure taken and their duration. The machine is trained in all of the COVID-19 published data for each region, county, state, and country in the world. It utilizes optimization to learn the best-fit values of the models parameters from past data in each region in the world, and it updates the predicted infections curves for any future restrictions that may be added or relaxed anywhere. We hope this interdisciplinary effort, a new mathematical model that predicts the impact of each measure in slowing down infection spread combined with the solving power of machine learning, is a useful tool in the fight against the current pandemic and potentially future ones.
We proposed a Monte-Carlo method to estimate temporal reproduction number without complete information about symptom onsets of all cases. Province-level analysis demonstrated the huge success of Chinese control measures on COVID-19, that is, provinces reproduction numbers quickly decrease to <1 by just one week after taking actions.
With the approval of vaccines for the coronavirus disease by many countries worldwide, most developed nations have begun, and developing nations are gearing up for the vaccination process. This has created an urgent need to provide a solution to optimally distribute the available vaccines once they are received by the authorities. In this paper, we propose a clustering-based solution to select optimal distribution centers and a Constraint Satisfaction Problem framework to optimally distribute the vaccines taking into consideration two factors namely priority and distance. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed models using real-world data obtained from the district of Chennai, India. The model provides the decision making authorities with optimal distribution centers across the district and the optimal allocation of individuals across these distribution centers with the flexibility to accommodate a wide range of demographics.
We study a simple realistic model for describing the diffusion of an infectious disease on a population of individuals. The dynamics is governed by a single functional delay differential equation, which, in the case of a large population, can be solved exactly, even in the presence of a time-dependent infection rate. This delay model has a higher degree of accuracy than that of the so-called SIR model, commonly used in epidemiology, which, instead, is formulated in terms of ordinary differential equations. We apply this model to describe the outbreak of the new infectious disease, Covid-19, in Italy, taking into account the containment measures implemented by the government in order to mitigate the spreading of the virus and the social costs for the population.
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