Distribution equality as an optimal epidemic mitigation strategy

Abstract

Upon the development of a drug or vaccine, a successful response to a global pandemic, such as COVID-19, requires the capacity for efficient distribution at a global scale. Considering constraints on production and shipping, most existing strategies seek to maximize the outflow of therapeutics, hence optimizing for rapid dissemination. Surprisingly, we find that this intuitive approach is counterproductive. The reason is that focusing strictly on the quantity of disseminated therapeutics, such strategies disregard their specific spreading patterns, most crucially – they overlook the interplay of these spreading patterns with those of the pathogens. This results in a discrepancy between supply and demand, that prohibits efficient mitigation even under optimal conditions of superfluous drug/vaccine flow. Therefore, here, we design a dissemination strategy that naturally follows the predicted spreading patterns of the epidemic, optimizing not just for supply volume, but also for its congruency with the anticipated demand. Specifically, we show that epidemics spread relatively uniformly across all destinations, and hence we introduce an equality constraint into our dissemination that prioritizes supply homogeneity. This strategy may, at times, slow down the supply rate in certain locations, however, thanks to its egalitarian nature, which mimics the flow of the viral spread, it provides a dramatic leap in overall mitigation efficiency, saving more lives with orders of magnitude less resources.