A Data Driven Approach for Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccinations in the Midwestern United States

摘要

Considering the potential for widespread adoption of social vulnerability indices(SVI) to prioritize COVID-19 vaccinations, there is a need to carefully assessthem, particularly for correspondence with outcomes (such as loss of life) inthe context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The University of Illinois at ChicagoSchool of Public Health Public Health GIS team developed a methodology forassessing and deriving vulnerability indices based on the premise that theseindices are, in the final analysis, classifiers. Application of this methodologyto several Midwestern states with a commonly used SVI indicates that by using onlythe SVI rankings there is a risk of assigning a high priority to locations with thelowest mortality rates and low priority to locations with the highest mortalityrates. Based on the findings, we propose using a two-dimensional approach torationalize the distribution of vaccinations. This approach has the potential toaccount for areas with high vulnerability characteristics as well as toincorporate the areas that were hard hit by the pandemic.