Layered vaccine allocation for spatio-temporal vaccination of COVID-19

Abstract

Optimal allocation of vaccine doses is a major challenge faced by the health authorities especially in the case of an ever-growing pandemic expansion and a limited supply availability. Based on a spatio-temporal compartmental virus propagation model applied to the case of SARS-CoV-2 virus, we investigate a layered vaccine allocation strategy for the subpopulations of a given country or a geographical region based on the prevalence of susceptible individuals as a prioritization metric. Our findings show that a relaxed layered allocation prioritization, where a maximum of regions benefit from vaccine doses is more effective in controlling the epidemic than a strict prioritization, focused only on the few most prioritized regions. These results are consistent among different vaccine rollout speeds for various limiting values of the priority list.