Category: Epidemiology

Summary: Testing whether booster campaigns that lag school-term transmission peaks by an intermediate amount can worsen outbreaks in a commuter-coupled metapopulation.

Vaccination timing is often planned around expected seasonal transmission, but imperfect timing may interact with mobility in counterintuitive ways. This experiment asks whether booster campaigns that are neither aligned with nor fully opposite to school-term transmission peaks can be especially harmful because immunity wanes just as connected patches synchronize into higher transmission.

The script simulates a grid-metapopulation SIRV system with school-term forcing, commuter coupling, and phased booster pulses. Instead of a single threshold, it compares epidemic outcomes across phase lags to see whether an intermediate mismatch creates a worse regime than the more obvious timing choices.

That makes the project a timing-interaction study rather than a simple vaccination-benefit check. It is aimed at the possibility that mobility and seasonal forcing can produce a distinct phase-mismatch window where partially delayed intervention performs worst.

Method: Grid-metapopulation SIRV simulations with school-term forcing, commuter coupling, and phase-shifted booster campaigns.

What is measured: Outbreak burden across phase lags, synchronization effects across patches, immunity-waning timing, and support for an intermediate worst-case mismatch.