Main Project Aim
The following factors will be considered:
(i) Vaccine coverage in the population (at various geographic scales (local, regional and global));
(ii) Vaccine efficacy against viral transmission (set to 20, 50, 80, and 100%);
(iii) Population size (in a meta-population setting at various geographic scales (local, regional and global));
(iv) Population density (in a meta-population setting at various geographic scales (local, regional and global));
(v) Population mobility
To meet the overall project aim, we have identified the following specific research questions:
- RQ1: To what extent can epidemiological models capture vaccination strategies for imperfect vaccines?
- RQ2: How will population mobility affect the effect of imperfect vaccines?
- RQ3: How can in silico experiments with digital twin technology help explore different vaccinations with imperfect vaccines be validated in vivo?
- RQ4: What are optimal distribution strategies of vaccine doses at different geographic scales (local, regional and global)?
Building on previous work in P1H
We have in previous work developed a digital twin framework which models a pandemic emergence at the global scale, see Stenseth et al. (2023a). This framework couples epidemiological models for 160 different countries with passenger travel data between countries on a day-by-day basis, and has been used to study “what if” scenarios describing travel interventions. This framework will serve as a starting point for our work in this project, but changes to the framework are required to study vaccine strategies for imperfect vaccines, and these pose some highly interesting research challenges.
Economic factors also need to be introduced into the digital twin framework because many economic parameters are essential to measure people’s living and working and welfare. Maintaining operation of economic systems during future pandemics is paramount to support the production and distribution of vaccines and the implementation of other related policies. Wang et al. (2023) showed that by establishing an appropriate economic benefit-sharing mechanism, vaccines can be better promoted to play a more efficient role globally. This project will integrate epidemiological models and economic supply chain models to develop digital twins to evaluate epidemiology of the pathogen and the effect of various vaccination strategies at different geospatial levels.
