Analyzing Country-Level Vaccination Rates and Determinants of Practical Capacity to Administer COVID-19 Vaccines
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Dec 30, 2024
Abstract
The COVID-19 vaccine development, manufacturing, transportation, and
administration proved an extreme logistics operation of global magnitude.
Global vaccination levels, however, remain a key concern in preventing the
emergence of new strains and minimizing the impact of the pandemic's disruption
of daily life. In this paper, country-level vaccination rates are analyzed
through a queuing framework to extract service rates that represent the
practical capacity of a country to administer vaccines. These rates are further
characterized through regression and interpretable machine learning methods
with country-level demographic, governmental, and socio-economic variates.
Model results show that participation in multi-governmental collaborations such
as COVAX may improve the ability to vaccinate. Similarly, improved
transportation and accessibility variates such as roads per area for low-income
countries and rail lines per area for high-income countries can improve rates.
It was also found that for low-income countries specifically, improvements in
basic and health infrastructure (as measured through spending on healthcare,
number of doctors and hospital beds per 100k, population percent with access to
electricity, life expectancy, and vehicles per 1000 people) resulted in higher
vaccination rates. Of the high-income countries, those with larger 65-plus
populations struggled to vaccinate at high rates, indicating potential
accessibility issues for the elderly. This study finds that improving basic and
health infrastructure, focusing on accessibility in the last mile, particularly
for the elderly, and fostering global partnerships can improve logistical
operations of such a scale. Such structural impediments and inequities in
global health care must be addressed in preparation for future global public
health crises.
