1. Prioritizing high-contact occupations raises effectiveness of vaccination campaigns.
- Author
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Nunner H, van de Rijt A, and Buskens V
- Subjects
- COVID-19 prevention & control, Humans, Contact Tracing, Disease Transmission, Infectious prevention & control, Immunization Programs ethics, Occupational Health, Occupations, Pandemics prevention & control, Vaccination
- Abstract
A twenty-year-old idea from network science is that vaccination campaigns would be more effective if high-contact individuals were preferentially targeted. Implementation is impeded by the ethical and practical problem of differentiating vaccine access based on a personal characteristic that is hard-to-measure and private. Here, we propose the use of occupational category as a proxy for connectedness in a contact network. Using survey data on occupation-specific contact frequencies, we calibrate a model of disease propagation in populations undergoing varying vaccination campaigns. We find that vaccination campaigns that prioritize high-contact occupational groups achieve similar infection levels with half the number of vaccines, while also reducing and delaying peaks. The paper thus identifies a concrete, operational strategy for dramatically improving vaccination efficiency in ongoing pandemics., (© 2022. The Author(s).)
- Published
- 2022
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