Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery for the Indian Population

Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery for the Indian Population

Meet Singh, Subrata Modak, Dhrubasish Sarkar
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/IJSI.301228
OnDemand:
(Individual Articles)
Available
$37.50
No Current Special Offers
TOTAL SAVINGS: $37.50

Abstract

As India has successfully developed a vaccine to fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, the government has started its immunization program to vaccinate the population. Initially, with the limited availability in vaccines, a prioritized roadmap was required to suggest public health strategies and target priority groups on the basis of population demographics, health survey information, city/region density, cold storage facilities, vaccine availability, and epidemiologic settings. In this paper, a machine learning-based predictive model is presented to help the government make informed decisions/insights around epidemiological and vaccine supply circumstances by predicting India's more critical segments that need to be catered to with vaccine deliveries as quickly as possible. Public data were scraped to create the dataset; exploratory data analysis was performed on the dataset to extract important features on which clustering and ranking algorithms were performed to figure out the importance and urgency of vaccine deliveries in each region.
Article Preview
Top

Introduction

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak has caused a devastating impact on almost every country in Earth. Due to its severity and ability to break global health system and economy by its roots, World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared it as a global pandemic. It’s believed to be originated from Wuhan, China but within no time it spread throughout the world causing crisis everywhere. COVID-19 crisis has yet again shown us that respiratory viral infections can take thousands of lives, irrespective of whether its healthy young individuals or elderly. It is continually spreading without showing any sign of slowing down. In order to fight the disease many kinds of nonpharmaceutical interventions have been implemented like night curfews, lockdowns, work from home, remote education, limited travelling and many more. Although these methods are helpful in preventing further transmission of the disease, but it is not enough. Many researchers have analysed the leading risk factor involved in spread of covid-19 infection (Ghorui et al., 2021). Deep learning algorithms (Dutta et al., 2021) are used to diagnosis and in order to optimize the medical service. World have seen the role of digital healthcare scientific system (Dutta et al., 2022) to recover from COVID infection. When the vaccine is under developing process, we think about how to control the situation. A long-term solution (Moore et al., 2020) such as a vaccine to protect against SARS-CoV-2 is a necessity. Based on past pandemic experiences we know that vaccination is the only effective and economical way to put an anchor on this pandemic and knowing the benefits of an effective vaccine, there is a huge widespread demand amongst the individuals and communities. Many research institute and pharmaceuticals companies worldwide are involved into developing a suitable vaccine with high efficacy. But it also calls for a need to have a well-structured system to distribute the vaccine in a way that human wellbeing is achieved, the vaccination drive should aim to reduce socio-economic disruption by making sure that the transmission is contained, and the severity of health adversaries and deaths are decreased. The drive should also be ethical in nature, when allocation and priority setting decisions for vaccination is being made it should have equal consideration to treat interests of all individuals and groups. It should also have national and demographic equality, i.e., factors like race, caste, religion, ethnicity, economic class (lower, middle, upper) should not have a role in accountability of vaccine prioritization. Individual and group risks, and vulnerabilities should be accounted in an unbiased manner. There should also be a sense of reciprocity, for the protection of the mass and for the welfare of the society, protection needs to be prioritized for those who possess significant additional risks and who are immediate threat to get infected like doctors, frontline workers, and other essential workers. Lastly, the drive must have legitimacy. Best available scientific evidence and expertise should be employed before distribution of the vaccines. The process should be transparent and unbiased in nature. If all of these measures are met, the vaccination drive should be able to engender deserved trust in prioritization decisions.

Complete Article List

Search this Journal:
Reset
Volume 12: 1 Issue (2024)
Volume 11: 1 Issue (2023)
Volume 10: 4 Issues (2022): 2 Released, 2 Forthcoming
Volume 9: 4 Issues (2021)
Volume 8: 4 Issues (2020)
Volume 7: 4 Issues (2019)
Volume 6: 4 Issues (2018)
Volume 5: 4 Issues (2017)
Volume 4: 4 Issues (2016)
Volume 3: 4 Issues (2015)
Volume 2: 4 Issues (2014)
Volume 1: 4 Issues (2013)
View Complete Journal Contents Listing