Strategic spatiotemporal vaccine distribution increases the survival rate in an infectious disease like Covid-19

Present hopes to conquer the Covid-19 epidemic are largely based on the expectation of a rapid availability of vaccines. However, once vaccine production starts, it will probably take time before there is enough vaccine for everyone, evoking the question how to distribute it best. While present vaccination guidelines largely focus on individual-based factors, i.e. on the question to whom vaccines should be provided first, e.g. to risk groups or to individuals with a strong social-mixing tendency, here we ask if a strategic spatiotemporal distribution of vaccines, e.g. to prioritize certain cities, can help to increase the overall survival rate of a population subject to an epidemic disease. To this end, we propose a strategy for the distribution of vaccines in time and space, which sequentially prioritizes regions with the most new cases of infection during a certain time frame and compare it with the standard practice of distributing vaccines demographically. Using a simple statistical model we find that, for a locally well-mixed population, the proposed strategy strongly reduces the number of deaths (by about a factor of two for basic reproduction numbers of R_0∼ 1.5-4 and by about 35