Optimal Control Applied to Vaccination and Testing Policies for COVID-19

Alberto Olivares and Ernesto Staffetti
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Alberto Olivares: Campus de Fuenlabrada, School of Telecommunication Engineering, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Camino del Molino 5, 28942 Madrid, Spain
Ernesto Staffetti: Campus de Fuenlabrada, School of Telecommunication Engineering, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Camino del Molino 5, 28942 Madrid, Spain

Mathematics, 2021, vol. 9, issue 23, 1-22

Abstract: In this paper, several policies for controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2 are determined under the assumption that a limited number of effective COVID-19 vaccines and tests are available. These policies are calculated for different vaccination scenarios representing vaccine supply and administration restrictions, plus their impacts on the disease transmission are analyzed. The policies are determined by solving optimal control problems of a compartmental epidemic model, in which the control variables are the vaccination rate and the testing rate for the detection of asymptomatic infected people. A combination of the proportion of threatened and deceased people together with the cost of vaccination of susceptible people, and detection of asymptomatic infected people, is taken as the objective functional to be minimized, whereas different types of algebraic constraints are considered to represent several vaccination scenarios. A direct transcription method is employed to solve these optimal control problems. More specifically, the Hermite–Simpson collocation technique is used. The results of the numerical experiments show that the optimal control approach offers healthcare system managers a helpful resource for designing vaccination programs and testing plans to prevent COVID-19 transmission.

Keywords: optimal control; vaccination and testing policies; COVID-19 transmission; epidemic compartmental model; sensitivity analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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