Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Westerink-Duijzer, L.E.
Author-Name-Last: Westerink-Duijzer
Author-Name-First: Evelot
Author-Name: van Jaarsveld, W.L.
Author-Name-Last: van Jaarsveld
Author-Name-First: Willem
Author-Name: Dekker, R.
Author-Name-Last: Dekker
Author-Name-First: Rommert
Author-Person: pde16
Title: The benefits of combining early aspecific vaccination with later specific vaccination
Abstract: Timing is of crucial importance for successful vaccination. To avoid a large outbreak, vaccines are
 administered preferably as quickly as possible. However, in the early stages of an outbreak the information
 on the disease is limited and waiting with the intervention allows to design a more tailored vaccination
 strategy. In this paper we study the resulting tradeoff between timing of vaccination and the effectiveness
 of the response.  
 We model disease progression using the seminal SIR model, and consider a decision maker who
 allocates her budget over two vaccine types: an early aspecific vaccine and a later specific vaccine. We
 analytically characterize the switching curve separating the parameter space region where the late specific
 vaccine is preferred from the region where the early aspecific type is preferred. More importantly, we
 show that the decision maker should not only consider pure strategies, i.e., strategies which spend the
 entire budget on one of the types. Instead, she should suitably invest in both vaccine types to benefit
 both from the early response and from the good vaccine. We prove that at the switching curve, such
 a hybrid strategy is strictly better than either of the pure strategies due to the non-linear dynamics
 of epidemics. Numerical experiments show that the associated benefit of hybrid strategies over pure
 strategies in terms of reduction of the number of infections may be more than 50%. Such experiments
 also substantiate our restriction to two vaccine types.
Length: 41
Creation-Date: 2017-02-07
File-URL: https://repub.eur.nl/pub/99515/EI2017-03.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Series: RePEc:ems:eureir
Number: EI2017-03
Keywords: optimization, vaccination, mathematical modelling, infectious diseases, SIR model
Handle: RePEc:ems:eureir:99515