To Stop the Pandemic Don’t Vaccinate the Vulnerable First
Link: https://www.wired.com/story/covid-19-vaccine-super-spreaders/
This article, written by Christopher Cox, focuses on the ideal way of distributing the eventual COVID-19 vaccine to limit the spread of the disease as fast and effectively as possible. According to scientists, disease experts, and the general public, vaccinating the most vulnerable will always be the priority. According to this article and the work of Notre Dame physicists and network theoreticians, there is a counterintuitive approach to diminishing the virus at a much more rapid rate – to vaccinate the “super spreaders,” not the vulnerable, first.
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Reka Albert used a random network model theorized by some of the first network scientists in the 1950s, Paul Erdos and Alfred Renyi. Applying the model to 2020 scenarios, they found, actually generates too random networks because humans are “extremely heterogenous” and rely on interconnectivity through massive network hubs. Applying this to the current pandemic, scientists are hypothesizing an 80-20 rule: “80 percent of cases stem from just 20 percent of infected individuals.” If you remove the highly sociable and interconnected hubs (such as very social individuals, indoor events, mass gatherings, etc), then the network of individuals will no longer have a similar connection and the spread will reduce significantly. Humans are not random, however. We are naturally a very social group and this explains much of the parabolic spread of the virus in the early stages of the pandemic.
There are plenty of individuals who contract the virus, and whether or not they display symptoms, do not spread it to anyone. One of Governor Cuomo’s biggest focuses throughout the pandemic has been to track and reduce the rate of transmission. Super-spreaders inflate that number however, and instances such as the ones mentioned in the article (such as a very sociable New Rochelle gentleman unknowingly contracting the virus in New York City and spreading it to hundreds and in turn thousands of individuals in Westchester).
Extremely sociable people can often find themselves connected to multiple groups, and like this New Rochelle gentleman, unknowingly be the most connected node of a strongly connected component of the human network. Finding these individuals, however, is not as easy a task as it is to find vulnerable individuals. Network theory can be applied to certainly identify significantly connected individuals, such as college students, essential workers, etc, but it is a seemingly impossible task to identify them all. While not exactly the same, it’s almost like the prisoner’s dilemma. Do you vaccinate the sociable super-spreaders first knowing it will reduce the vaccine the fastest or do you cut your losses and vaccinate the most vulnerable first because it’s extremely difficult to actually achieve the Nash equilibrium.