2019-20 coronavirus outbreak

Linguistics

Philosophy

Betacoronavirus

Prioritization

Government (linguistics)

Virology

Telecommunications

Computer science

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Outbreak

Environmental health

Business

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Process management

Economic shortage

Vaccination

Population

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Coronavirus Infections

Medicine

Transmission (telecommunications)

Pandemic

Disease

Pathology

Vaccine efficacy

Science Advances

Vaccines, when available, will likely become our best tool to control the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, vaccine shortages will likely occur. Using an age-stratified mathematical model paired with optimization algorithms, we determined optimal vaccine allocation for four different metrics (deaths, symptomatic infections, and maximum non-ICU and ICU hospitalizations) under many scenarios. We find that a vaccine with effectiveness ≥50% would be enough to substantially mitigate the ongoing pandemic, provided that a high percentage of the population is optimally vaccinated. When minimizing deaths, we find that for low vaccine effectiveness, irrespective of vaccination coverage, it is optimal to allocate vaccine to high-risk (older) age groups first. In contrast, for higher vaccine effectiveness, there is a switch to allocate vaccine to high-transmission (younger) age groups first for high vaccination coverage. While there are other societal and ethical considerations, this work can provide an evidence-based rationale for vaccine prioritization.

Vaccine optimization for COVID-19: Who to vaccinate first?