Abstract
A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted. Implementation is impeded by the ethical and practical problem of differentiating vaccine access based on a personal characteristic that is hard-to-measure and private. Here, we propose the use of occupational category as a proxy for connectedness in a contact network. Using survey data on occupation-specific contact frequencies, we calibrate a model of disease propagation in populations undergoing varying vaccination campaigns. We find that vaccination campaigns that prioritize high-contact occupational groups achieve similar infection levels with half the number of vaccines, while also reducing and delaying peaks. The paper thus identifies a concrete, operational strategy for dramatically improving vaccination efficiency in ongoing pandemics.
Highlights
A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted
How does one identify high-contact individuals so that they can be targeted in vaccination campaigns? We propose the use of occupational groups as a proxy for the number of close-range contacts in a contact network
Final size is the percentage of nodes that have been infected over the entirety of a simulated epidemic
Summary
A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted. Recent studies that calibrate models using data on close-range contact frequencies have demonstrated that in the case of COVID-19, the prioritizing of individuals with many close-range contacts would dramatically increase the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns[3,4]. Differentiating COVID-19 policy interventions on the basis of individuals’ occupations is executable It has already been part of public policy in many countries, both in social distancing legislation and vaccine access, except that prioritization was not based on network analysis. For this approach to be effective, there must be significant variability in close-range exposure between individuals working in different occupations.
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