You are only as safe as your riskiest contact: Effective COVID-19 vaccine distribution using local network information.

ABSTRACT: When vaccines are limited, prior research has suggested it is most protective to distribute vaccines to the most central individuals - those who are most likely to spread the disease. But surveying the population's social network is a costly and time-consuming endeavour, often not completed before vaccination must begin. This paper validates a local targeting method for distributing vaccines. That is, ask randomly chosen individuals to nominate for vaccination the person they are in contact with who has the most disease-spreading contacts. Even better, ask that person to nominate the next person for vaccination, and so on. To validate this approach, we simulate the spread of COVID-19 along empirical contact networks collected in two high schools, in the United States and France, pre-COVID.

SUBMITTER: McGail AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8979884 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature