Dose-Optimal Vaccine Allocation over Multiple Populations.

ABSTRACT: Vaccination is an effective way to prevent an epidemic. It results in immunity for the vaccinated individuals, but it also reduces the infection pressure for unvaccinated people. Thus people may actually escape infection without being vaccinated: the so-called "herd effect." We analytically study the relation between the herd effect and the vaccination fraction for the seminal SIR compartmental model, which consists of a set of differential equations describing the time course of an epidemic. We prove that the herd effect is in general convex-concave in the vaccination fraction and give precise conditions on the epidemic for the convex part to arise. We derive the significant consequences of these structural insights for allocating a limited vaccine stockpile to multiple non-

SUBMITTER: Duijzer LE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7168135 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature