Optimizing two-dose vaccine resource allocation to combat a pandemic in the context of limited supply: The case of COVID-19

The adequate vaccination is a promising solution to mitigate the enormous socio-economic costs of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and allow us to return to normal pre-pandemic activity patterns. However, the vaccine supply shortage will be inevitable during the early stage of the vaccine rollout. Public health authorities face a crucial challenge in allocating scarce vaccines to maximize the benefits of vaccination. In this paper, we study a multi-period two-dose vaccine allocation problem when the vaccine supply is highly limited. To address this problem, we constructed a novel age-structured compartmental model to capture COVID-19 transmission and formulated as a nonlinear programming (NLP) model to minimize the total number of deaths in the population. In the NLP model, we explicitly take into account the two-dose vaccination procedure and several important epidemiologic features of COVID-19, such as pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission, as well as group heterogeneity in susceptibility, symptom rates, severity, etc. We validated the applicability of the proposed model using a real case of the 2021 COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the Midlands of England. We conducted comparative studies to demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our numerical results show that prioritizing the allocation of vaccine resources to older age groups is a robust strategy to prevent more subsequent deaths. In addition, we show that releasing more vaccine doses for first-dose recipients could lead to a greater vaccination benefit than holding back second doses. We also find that it is necessary to maintain appropriate non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the vaccination rollout, especially in low-resource settings. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that starting vaccination as soon as possible is able to markedly alleviate the epidemic impact when the vaccine resources are limited but are currently available. Our model provides an effective tool to assist policymakers in developing adaptive COVID-19 likewise vaccination strategies for better preparedness against future pandemic threats.