Analyzing Country-Level Vaccination Rates and Determinants of Practical Capacity to Administer COVID-19 Vaccines

TL;DR

This paper analyzes country-level COVID-19 vaccination rates using a queuing model and machine learning to identify key determinants like infrastructure, collaboration, and demographics affecting vaccination capacity worldwide.

Contribution

It introduces a novel queuing framework to quantify practical vaccination capacity and combines regression and interpretable machine learning to identify critical factors influencing vaccination rates.

Findings

Participation in multi-governmental collaborations improves vaccination capacity.

Enhanced transportation infrastructure correlates with higher vaccination rates.

Low-income countries benefit from investments in healthcare infrastructure and accessibility.

Abstract

The COVID-19 vaccine development, manufacturing, transportation, and administration proved an extreme logistics operation of global magnitude. Global vaccination levels, however, remain a key concern in preventing the emergence of new strains and minimizing the impact of the pandemic's disruption of daily life. In this paper, country-level vaccination rates are analyzed through a queuing framework to extract service rates that represent the practical capacity of a country to administer vaccines. These rates are further characterized through regression and interpretable machine learning methods with country-level demographic, governmental, and socio-economic variates. Model results show that participation in multi-governmental collaborations such as COVAX may improve the ability to vaccinate. Similarly, improved transportation and accessibility variates such as roads per area for low-income countries and rail lines per area for high-income countries can improve rates. It was also found that for low-income countries specifically, improvements in basic and health infrastructure (as measured through spending on healthcare, number of doctors and hospital beds per 100k, population percent with access to electricity, life expectancy, and vehicles per 1000 people) resulted in higher vaccination rates. Of the high-income countries, those with larger 65-plus populations struggled to vaccinate at high rates, indicating potential accessibility issues for the elderly. This study finds that improving basic and health infrastructure, focusing on accessibility in the last mile, particularly for the elderly, and fostering global partnerships can improve logistical operations of such a scale. Such structural impediments and inequities in global health care must be addressed in preparation for future global public health crises.