Evaluation of Vaccination Strategies for the metropolitan area of Madrid

BackgroundThis work analyses the impact of different vaccination strategies on the propagation of COVID-19 within the Madrid metropolitan area starting the 27th of December 2020 and ending in the Summer of 2021. The predictions are based on simulation using EpiGraph, an agent-based COVID-19 simulator. MethodsWe briefly summarize the different interconnected models of EpiGraph and then we provide a comprehensive description of the vaccination model. We evaluate different vaccination strategies, and we validate the simulator by comparing the simulation results with real data from the metropolitan area of Madrid during the third wave. ResultsWe consider the different COVID-19 propagation scenarios on a social environment consisting of the ten largest cities in the Madrid metropolitan area, with 5 million individuals. The results show that the strategy that fares best is to vaccinate the elderly first with the two doses spaced 56 days apart; this approach reduces the final infection rate and the number of deaths by an additional 6% and 3% with respect to vaccinating the elderly first at the interval between doses recommended by the vaccine producer. ConclusionResults show that prioritizing the vaccination of young individuals would significantly increase the number of deaths. On the other hand, spacing out the first and second dose by 56 days would result in a slight reduction in the number of infections and deaths. The reason is the increase in the number of vaccinated individuals at any time during the simulation.