Optimizing Vaccine Allocation to Combat the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak of COVID-19 has spurred extensive research worldwide to develop a vaccine. However, when a vaccine becomes available, limited production and distribution capabilities will likely lead to another challenge: who to prioritize for vaccination to mitigate the near-end impact of the pandemic? To tackle that question, this paper first expands a state-of-the-art epidemiological model, called DELPHI, to capture the effects of vaccinations and the variability in mortality rates across subpopulations. It then integrates this predictive model into a prescriptive model to optimize vaccine allocation, formulated as a bilinear non-convex program. To solve this model, this paper proposes a coordinate descent algorithm that iterates between optimizing vaccine allocations and simulating the dynamics of the pandemic. We implement the model and algorithm using real-world data in the United States. All else equal, the optimized vaccine allocation prioritizes states with a large number of projected cases and subpopulations facing higher risks (e.g., older ones). Ultimately, the optimized vaccine allocation can reduce the death toll of the pandemic by an estimated 10-25%, or 10,000-20,000 deaths over a three-month period in the United States alone.

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Recommended citation: D. Bertsimas et al. (2020), Optimizing Vaccine Allocation to Combat the COVID-19 Pandemic, under review.