How to improve and speed up vaccine allocation, from my email

One issue I haven’t seen discussed is slow throughput of the Vaccine administration, due to a combination of inefficient binning/allocation of distributed vaccines, hesitation to take the vaccine, lack of a central database of available appointments for vaccination, and those time slots potentially going empty if a front line worker misses their appointment, and when there’s no standby/waitlist for people to receive it.

These seems like a use case for a priority queue/heap, which would allow high priority folks to join the queue late but be bumped up to their appropriate priority if they wanted the vaccine, while also allowing those who want the vaccine but are not currently prioritized to get it if there are unallocated supplies.

If prioritization is done (cdc guidelines or not) by restricting who can get it during a particular time period, then it’s guaranteed that throughout won’t be maximized, as all appointment slots won’t be necessarily filled (given the hesitance I’ve heard from people across different levels of education and socioeconomic status) by the allowed demographics at each office where vaccines are available. Meanwhile, there will be those who would gladly take it in an instant who aren’t allowed.

I worry that slow throughput and bad prioritization vaccine administration will keep hospitals indefinitely full, hemorrhaging money, and will thus require a bailout, which I expect will come with medicare4all-style strings attached.

That is from Abhi C., a loyal MR reader.

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