Abstract
BackgroundVaccines are an important tool to limit the health and economic damage of the Covid-19 pandemic. Several vaccine candidates already provided promising effectiveness data, but it is crucial for an effective vaccination campaign that people are willing and able to get vaccinated as soon as possible. Taking Germany as an example, we provide insights of using a mathematical approach for the planning and location of vaccination sites to optimally administer vaccines against Covid-19.MethodsWe used mathematical programming for computing an optimal selection of vaccination sites out of a given set (i.e., university hospitals, health department related locations and general practices). Different patient-to-facility assignments and doctor-to-facility assignments and different constraints on the number of vaccinees per site or maximum travel time are used.ResultsIn order to minimize the barriers for people to get vaccinated, i.e., limit the one-way travel journey (airline distance) by around 35 km for 75% of the population (with a maximum of 70 km), around 80 well-positioned facilities can be enough. If only the 38 university hospitals are being used, the 75% distance increases to around 50 km (with a maximum of 145 km). Using all 400 health departments or all 56 000 general practices can decrease the journey length significantly, but comes at the price of more required staff and possibly wastage of only partially used vaccine containers.ConclusionsIn the case of free assignments, the number of required physicians can in most scenarios be limited to 2 000, which is also the minimum with our assumptions. However, when travel distances for the patients are to be minimized, capacities of the facilities must be respected, or administrative assignments are prespecified, an increased number of physicians is unavoidable.
Highlights
In the expectation of an upcoming availability of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, public health authorities already need to make appropriate preparations in order to utilize the available vaccine capacities from the very beginning
Given the expected shortness of doses in comparison to the demand in the initial phase of the vaccination campaign, such a decentralized setting on the one hand poses the risk of wastage due to fixed container sizes and non-adherence to vaccination recommendations on the other hand
In the absence of knowledge of the actual temperature and other technical requirements, the well-equipped university hospitals were brought into discussion as possible vaccination sites
Summary
In the expectation of an upcoming availability of vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus, public health authorities already need to make appropriate preparations in order to utilize the available vaccine capacities from the very beginning. Since there are only 38 of them in Germany, it is obvious that the distances for the vast majority of citizens are significantly longer than in the general physician scenario Bundling those to be vaccinated in a central location makes it easier to distribute the vaccinations only to the intended population cohorts; at the same time, many more people, especially from risk groups, meet in one place. For later stages of the vaccination procedure, where more vaccinations are available and the bottleneck of the distribution problem moves towards finding people willing to be vaccinated, the proposed model cannot be applied directly This situation is not discussed in this contribution
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