Sharon’s paper, Optimal strategies for combining vaccine prioritization and social distancing to reduce hospitalizations and mitigate COVID19 progression, is now online at medRxiv.
A COVID19 vaccine is now available but its deployment is limited. Understanding how to optimally combine vaccines with social distancing (SD) is a priority, but a mechanistic understanding of the interplay between them is missing. We developed a data-driven age-structured model in which vaccines are deployed during the pandemic and their prioritization can shift between target groups. Vaccine and across-population SD work in synergism up to a threshold beyond which vaccination is inefficient in reducing hospitalizations. The inefficiency threshold can be eliminated by applying SD to age groups that are not vaccinated. Moreover, SD, but not vaccination, affects the time to reach zero viral growth. Overall, an optimal strategy is to prioritize elderly (60+) while applying SD to adults (20-59). Finally, the same reduction in hospitalization can be achieved in multiple ways, allowing for flexible public health policies.
Elucidating the complexity of ecological systems
