Group centrality in optimal and suboptimal vaccination for epidemic models in contact networks

Abstract

The pursuit of strategies that minimize the number of individuals needing vaccination to control an outbreak is a well-established area of study in mathematical epidemiology. However, for certain diseases, public policy tends to prioritize immunizing vulnerable individuals over epidemic control. As a result, optimal vaccination strategies may not always be effective in supporting real-world public policies. A similar situation happens when a new vaccine is introduced and is in short supply, as target priority groups for vaccination have to be defined. In this work, we focus on a disease that results in long-term immunity and spreads through a heterogeneous population, represented by a contact network. We study four well-known group centrality measures and show that the GED-Walk offers a reliable means of estimating the impact of vaccinating specific groups of individuals, even in suboptimal cases. Additionally, we depart from the search for target individuals to be vaccinated and provide proxies for identifying optimal groups for vaccination. While the GED-Walk is the most useful centrality measure for suboptimal cases, the betweenness (a related, but different centrality measure) stands out when looking for optimal groups. This indicates that optimal vaccination is not concerned with breaking the largest number of transmission routes, but interrupting geodesic ones.

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Reproductions