Optimizing COVID-19 vaccine distribution and its economic impact in a geographically dispersed region

Just over a year after the COVID-19 outbreak in Dec. 2019, substantial efforts from several countries led to the development and emergency approval to use several promising vaccines. At that time, the limited logistics available to manage the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines posed new challenges, primarily intended to scale up production capacity and develop a distribution network to transport vaccines to medical facilities in diverse regions worldwide to reach herd immunity in a timely manner. In this paper, we analyze the actions that must be taken to achieve the second goal in a region where the population distribution is geographically dispersed. A new mathematical framework is proposed to coordinate all the necessary activities for selecting the locations and capacities of temporary medical facilities, purchasing single-dose and two-dose vaccines by medical facilities in an orderly manner, and generating a vaccination timetable for residents living in different townships to nearby medical facilities while minimizing the overall cost, including the cost of setting up temporary medical facilities, travel cost of population to medical facilities, purchasing cost of vaccines, and inventory holding cost. The mathematical framework also involves the computation of an effective time window for the minimum immunization time that depends on vaccine availability, and capacities of existing medical centers and temporary medical facilities that can be installed. The proposed framework has been employed to generate a vaccination schedule for residents of a county in Pennsylvania using real data.