The US coronavirus vaccine rollout continues to improve. While vaccine distribution has not always been smooth, it’s now much faster than during the pandemic’s early stages, with more people getting vaccinated more quickly. But challenges persist in ensuring that everyone gets their shot, particularly those in communities who have been underserved in the past.
Eleven months ago, when President Joe Biden assumed office, case counts and death rates were skyrocketing, and people generally remained sequestered in their homes, avoiding even the most basic public health steps like wearing masks or taking their kids to school. Biden promised to change this and launched a massive effort to make sure that as many people as possible were vaccinated, especially those in underserved communities.
A key to success will be prioritizing which age groups receive available vaccines first. There is a growing literature on optimising the use of limited vaccine supplies by dividing the population into age groups and using different vaccination strategies to reduce total deaths after a pandemic. An important study by Bubar et al uses an age-stratified SEIR model and compares five different vaccine priority strategies.
They find that if children are excluded from the vaccination campaign, prioritization by interactions is superior only at high rollout rates (>0.75%) and low levels of self-protection by the younger population (“level of protection and awareness” or lpa). At lower daily vaccination rollout rates, a dynamic RbPAD strategy seems moderately superior to that with priority by interaction.