Hybrid Approach for COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution

Since December 2019, the entire world has become fully uncontrolled due to the critical and unpredictable nature of the COVID-19 virus. The researchers have proposed various precautionary measures to protect ourselves from it. One of the most established and acceptable tools to control the COVID-19 pandemic is vaccination. Pharmaceutical companies are trying their best to supply vaccines according to requirements within a short period. It has become a challenging task to allocate a limited quantity of vaccines among the state and union territories with respect to multiple aspects. A number of factors are involved and have various impacts on the distribution of vaccines. The impacts of the vaccine distribution factors are estimated using the parameters that are responsible for spreading the COVID-19 infection, such as population density, active cases, infection rate, and total infected persons. In this article, we propose a proportional and infection-based vaccine allocation technique to distribute the vaccine among states or union territories of India based on six COVID-19-related factors to reduce the day-wise infection rate rapidly. Accuracy rate and three distribution grades are used to measure the performance of the proposed methods. Then, a hybrid method is developed by combining the proportional and infection-based vaccine allocation techniques to improve the accuracy rate of the vaccine distribution. Finally, we compare the proportional and infection-based vaccine allocation technique with the hybrid approach, where the hybrid approach performs better.