Vaccine Prioritisation Using Bluetooth Exposure Notification Apps

The results of COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials suggest that an end to the pandemic is within reach. However, public health authorities world-wide are faced with the difficult task of prioritizing their allocation [17, 10, 2]. Theory indicates that prioritizing vaccination of individuals with more contacts can be disproportionately effective [25, 8, 5, 3]. However, implementation of such strategies has been hampered by inability to determine population contact structure. One of the novel tools introduced during the pandemic has been the use of Bluetooth technology to assist in contact tracing and exposure notification [6, 13, 12]. Here we show that the technology underlying these Bluetooth exposure notification applications can be leveraged to efficiently prioritise vaccine allocation. Our approach is based on the insight that these apps also act as local sensing devices measuring each user’s total exposure time to other app users, thereby enabling the implementation of a previously impossible vaccine strategy that prioritises potential super-spreaders based on total exposure time. To compare vaccination strategies we introduce a novel and widely generalizable measure of vaccination efficiency. By extending percolation theory we furthermore demonstrate that our proposed “hot-spotting” strategy can achieve herd immunity with less than half as many vaccines as distributing the vaccines uniformly in the population.