The role of childrens’ vaccination for COVID-19—Pareto-optimal allocations of vaccines
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Abstract
COVID-19 vaccines have been approved for children of age five and older in many countries. However, there is an ongoing debate as to whether children should be vaccinated and at what priority. In this work, we use mathematical modeling and optimization to study how vaccine allocations to different age groups effect epidemic outcomes. In particular, we consider the effect of extending vaccination campaigns to include the vaccination of children. When vaccine availability is limited, we consider Pareto-optimal allocations with respect to competing measures of the number of infections and mortality and systematically study the trade-offs among them. In the scenarios considered, when some weight is given to the number of infections, we find that it is optimal to allocate vaccines to adolescents in the age group 10-19, even when they are assumed to be less susceptible than adults. We further find that age group 0-9 is included in the optimal allocation for sufficiently high values of the basic reproduction number.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.26.21256101: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study is subject to several limitations. We focus on the outcomes in the medium-term range after the vaccination campaign has ended. Over longer timescales, the possibilities of waning immunity and virus mutation might influence these predictions. Our study optimizes outcomes for the post-vaccination phase, and is, therefore, most relevant when …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.04.26.21256101: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
Ethics not detected. Sex as a biological variable not detected. Randomization not detected. Blinding not detected. Power Analysis not detected. Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:This study is subject to several limitations. We focus on the outcomes in the medium-term range after the vaccination campaign has ended. Over longer timescales, the possibilities of waning immunity and virus mutation might influence these predictions. Our study optimizes outcomes for the post-vaccination phase, and is, therefore, most relevant when disease spread is contained during the vaccination campaign, e.g., by non-pharmaceutical interventions. In this case, once a vaccine allocation that is optimized for post-vaccination outcomes is determined, transient features of a vaccination campaign that results in the desired allocation can be designed, for example, to allow gradually relaxing non-pharmaceutical interventions during the campaign (7). Accordingly, we do not account for increased mortality rates during periods of excessive hospital load (13). In case the vaccination campaign occurs in parallel to an ongoing outbreak, short-term goals are likely to dominate the design of the vaccination campaign (6). An inherent limitation of any design of a mass vaccination campaign is that not all relevant factors are known in advance, e.g., level of vaccine hesitancy, the overall availability of vaccines, emergence of new lineages, and disease outbreaks. In such circumstances, our work can readily be adapted to optimize the allocation of the remaining available vaccines according to current estimates, taking into account numbers of those already vaccinated, recovered and active...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.
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