Toward effective vaccine deployment: a systematic study

Vaccination is a commonly-used epidemic control strategy based on direct antiviral immunization and indirect reduction of virus transmissibility. There exist three factors related to the efficacy of vaccine deployment; they are: (1) vaccine coverage, (2) releasing time, and (3) deployment method. Yet, the exact impacts of these factors still remain to be systematically studied. In our work, we examine the effectiveness of vaccination-based epidemic control in adjusting the composition of susceptible and infectious individuals (referred to as composite structure) in a host population. We develop a modified compartmental infection model for characterizing virus spreading dynamics in several age-specific host populations (one host population for each age group). We consider vaccine deployment schedules that correspond to different settings of the three deployment factors. Based on our simulation-based experiments, we evaluate the impacts of deployment factors on virus spreading dynamics as well as their implications for an effective vaccination strategy.