Prioritizing high-contact occupations raises effectiveness of vaccination campaigns.

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 ident

SUBMITTER: Nunner H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8760242 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature