Evaluating strategies for spatial allocation of vaccines based on risk and centrality

Singer, B. J.; Thompson, R. N.; Bonsall, M. B.

When vaccinating a large population in response to an invading pathogen, it is often necessary to prioritise some individuals to be vaccinated first. One way to do this is to choose individuals to vaccinate based on their location. Methods for this prioritisation include strategies which target those regions most at risk of importing the pathogen, and strategies which target regions with high centrality on the travel network. We use a simple infectious disease epidemic model to compare a risk-targeting strategy to two different centrality-targeting strategies based on betweenness centrality and random walk percolation centrality, respectively. We find that the relative effectiveness of these strategies in reducing the total number of infections varies with the basic reproduction number of the pathogen, travel rates, structure of the travel network, and vaccine availability. We conclude that, when a pathogen has high spreading capacity, or when vaccine availability is limited, centrality-targeting strategies should be considered as an alternative to the more commonly used risk-targeting strategies.