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India approved 2 COVID vaccines for emergency use. Doses could be administered as soon as this month. Happy to share modeling work done w/ @foy_brody @kayurmehta @MenonBioPhysics Dr Shet from @IVACtweets and Dr Britto from @BostonChildrens/ @StJohnsResearch in @ISID_org’s IJID.
We assessed different age-specific vaccine allocation strategies using transmission dynamics, age structures, and social mixing patterns from India.
We found that allocating COVID19 vaccines first in older populations provides the greatest relative reduction for mortality. Allocating without preference for ages can result in fewer overall cases in some cases, but this benefit was marginal.
We looked at vaccines that disrupt and don’t disrupt transmission. For vaccines that disrupt transmission, we saw a greater relative reduction in cases when vaccine was allocated without preference. Again, this difference was marginal.
Regardless, rolling out vaccine doses faster results in smaller relative differences when comparing different age-based allocation strategies. Nothing surprising there.
We did not take into account strategies that prioritize health workers. Though, this is an interesting issue that is playing out already as countries consider who should get the vaccine first.
PS: This is a pre-proof and some of the text/figures will change.
Paper can be accessed here: https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20)32599-6/fulltext
