Optimal vaccination: Various (counter) intuitive examples

TL;DR

This paper illustrates the theoretical framework for optimal vaccination strategies through various examples, analyzing factors like vaccination timing, social contact patterns, and network structure to derive explicit solutions.

Contribution

It provides explicit analytic expressions for optimal vaccination strategies in different network scenarios, enhancing understanding of vaccination policy design.

Findings

Optimal strategies depend on contact network structure.

Vaccinating one individual at a time can be suboptimal.

Assortativity influences the shape of optimal strategies.

Abstract

In previous articles, we formalized the problem of optimal allocation strategies for a (perfect) vaccine in an infinite-dimensional metapopulation model. The aim of the current paper is to illustrate this theoretical framework with multiple examples where one can derive the analytic expression of the optimal strategies. We discuss in particular the following points: whether or not it is possible to vaccinate optimally when the vaccine doses are given one at a time (greedy vaccination strategies); the effect of assortativity (that is, the tendency to have more contacts with similar individuals) on the shape of optimal vaccination strategies; the particular case where everybody has the same number of neighbors.