Hamilton Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland.
PLoS One. 2023 Sep 5;18(9):e0290974. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0290974. eCollection 2023.
The outbreak of a novel coronavirus causing severe acute respiratory syndrome in December 2019 has escalated into a worldwide pandemic. In this work, we propose a compartmental model to describe the dynamics of transmission of infection and use it to obtain the optimal vaccination control. The model accounts for the various stages of the vaccination, and the optimisation is focused on minimising the infections to protect the population and relieve the healthcare system. As a case study, we selected the Republic of Ireland. We use data provided by Ireland's COVID-19 Data-Hub and simulate the evolution of the pandemic with and without the vaccination in place for two different scenarios, one representative of a national lockdown situation and the other indicating looser restrictions in place. One of the main findings of our work is that the optimal approach would involve a vaccination programme where the older population is vaccinated in larger numbers earlier while simultaneously part of the younger population also gets vaccinated to lower the risk of transmission between groups. We compare our simulated results with those of the vaccination policy taken by the Irish government to explore the advantages of our optimisation method. Our comparison suggests that a similar reduction in cases may have been possible even with a reduced set of vaccinations available for use.
2019 年 12 月，一种新型冠状病毒引发的严重急性呼吸系统综合征疫情爆发，并迅速升级为全球大流行。在这项工作中，我们提出了一个房室模型来描述感染的传播动力学，并利用它来获得最佳的疫苗接种控制。该模型考虑了疫苗接种的各个阶段，优化的重点是最大限度地减少感染，以保护人群并减轻医疗系统的负担。作为一个案例研究，我们选择了爱尔兰共和国。我们使用爱尔兰 COVID-19 数据中心提供的数据，针对两种不同的情况模拟了疫情的演变，一种情况代表全国封锁的情况，另一种情况则表示放宽了限制。我们工作的主要发现之一是，最佳方法是实施疫苗接种计划，优先为老年人群体大规模接种疫苗，同时让部分年轻人群体也接种疫苗，以降低群体之间的传播风险。我们将模拟结果与爱尔兰政府采取的疫苗接种政策进行了比较，以探讨我们的优化方法的优势。我们的比较表明，即使可用的疫苗接种数量减少，也可能实现类似的病例减少。
