Modeling non-pharmaceutical interventions in the COVID-19 pandemic with survey-based simulations
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Kaffai M
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8553158 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:An epidemiological model for COVID-19 was developed and implemented in MATLAB/GNU Octave for use by public health practitioners, policy makers, and the general public. The model distinguishes four stages in the disease: infected, sick, seriously sick, and better. The model was preliminarily parameterized based on observations of the spread of the disease. The model assumes a case mortality rate of 1.5%. Preliminary simulations with the model indicate that concepts such as "herd immunity" and containment ("flattening the curve") are highly misleading in the context of this virus. Public policies based on these concepts are inadequate to protect the population. Only reducing the R 0 of the virus below 1 is an effective strategy for maintaining the death burden of COVID-19 within the normal range of seasonal flu. The model is illustrated with the cases of Italy, France, and Iran and is able to describe the number of deaths as a function of time in all these cases although future projections tend to slightly overestimate the number of deaths when the analysis is made early on. The model can also be used to describe reopenings of the economy after a lockdown. The case mortality rate is still prone to large uncertainty, but modeling combined with an investigation of blood donations in The Netherlands imposes a lower limit of 1%.
| S-EPMC7416305 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Infectious diseases and human behavior are intertwined. On one side, our movements and interactions are the engines of transmission. On the other, the unfolding of viruses might induce changes to our daily activities. While intuitive, our understanding of such feedback loop is still limited. Before COVID-19 the literature on the subject was mainly theoretical and largely missed validation. The main issue was the lack of empirical data capturing behavioral change induced by diseases. Things have dramatically changed in 2020. Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been the key weapon against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and affected virtually any societal process. Travel bans, events cancellation, social distancing, curfews, and lockdowns have become unfortunately very familiar. The scale of the emergency, the ease of survey as well as crowdsourcing deployment guaranteed by the latest technology, several Data for Good programs developed by tech giants, major mobile phone providers, and other companies have allowed unprecedented access to data describing behavioral changes induced by the pandemic. Here, I review some of the vast literature written on the subject of NPIs during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, I analyze 348 articles written by more than 2518 authors in the first 12 months of the emergency. While the large majority of the sample was obtained by querying PubMed, it includes also a hand-curated list. Considering the focus, and methodology I have classified the sample into seven main categories: epidemic models, surveys, comments/perspectives, papers aiming to quantify the effects of NPIs, reviews, articles using data proxies to measure NPIs, and publicly available datasets describing NPIs. I summarize the methodology, data used, findings of the articles in each category and provide an outlook highlighting future challenges as well as opportunities.
| S-EPMC7881715 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has forced societies across the world to resort to social distancing to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Due to the economic impacts of social distancing, there is growing desire to relax these measures. To characterize a range of possible strategies for control and to understand their consequences, we performed an optimal control analysis of a mathematical model of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Given that the pandemic is already underway and controls have already been initiated, we calibrated our model to data from the USA and focused our analysis on optimal controls from May 2020 through December 2021. We found that a major factor that differentiates strategies that prioritize lives saved versus reduced time under control is how quickly control is relaxed once social distancing restrictions expire in May 2020. Strategies that maintain control at a high level until at least summer 2020 allow for tapering of control thereafter and minimal deaths, whereas strategies that relax control in the short term lead to fewer options for control later and a higher likelihood of exceeding hospital capacity. Our results also highlight that the potential scope for controlling COVID-19 until a vaccine is available depends on epidemiological parameters about which there is still considerable uncertainty, including the basic reproduction number and the effectiveness of social distancing. In light of those uncertainties, our results do not constitute a quantitative forecast and instead provide a qualitative portrayal of possible outcomes from alternative approaches to control.
| S-EPMC7473596 | biostudies-literature
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC8385050 | biostudies-literature
Project description:This paper describes a data-driven simulation study that explores the relative impact of several low-cost and practical non-pharmaceutical interventions on the spread of COVID-19 in an outpatient hospital dialysis unit. The interventions considered include: (i) voluntary self-isolation of healthcare personnel (HCPs) with symptoms; (ii) a program of active syndromic surveillance and compulsory isolation of HCPs; (iii) the use of masks or respirators by patients and HCPs; (iv) improved social distancing among HCPs; (v) increased physical separation of dialysis stations; and (vi) patient isolation combined with preemptive isolation of exposed HCPs. Our simulations show that under conditions that existed prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, extremely high rates of COVID-19 infection can result in a dialysis unit. In simulations under worst-case modeling assumptions, a combination of relatively inexpensive interventions such as requiring surgical masks for everyone, encouraging social distancing between healthcare professionals (HCPs), slightly increasing the physical distance between dialysis stations, and-once the first symptomatic patient is detected-isolating that patient, replacing the HCP having had the most exposure to that patient, and relatively short-term use of N95 respirators by other HCPs can lead to a substantial reduction in both the attack rate and the likelihood of any spread beyond patient zero. For example, in a scenario with R0 = 3.0, 60% presymptomatic viral shedding, and a dialysis patient being the infection source, the attack rate falls from 87.8% at baseline to 34.6% with this intervention bundle. Furthermore, the likelihood of having no additional infections increases from 6.2% at baseline to 32.4% with this intervention bundle.
| S-EPMC8291695 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 epidemic created, at the time of writing the paper, highly unusual and uncertain socio-economic conditions. The world economy was severely impacted and business-as-usual activities severely disrupted. The situation presented the necessity to make a trade-off between individual health and safety on one hand and socio-economic progress on the other. Based on the current understanding of the epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19, a broad set of control measures has emerged along dimensions such as restricting people's movements, high-volume testing, contract tracing, use of face masks, and enforcement of social-distancing. However, these interventions have their own limitations and varying level of efficacy depending on factors such as the population density and the socio-economic characteristics of the area. To help tailor the intervention, we develop a configurable, fine-grained agent-based simulation model that serves as a virtual representation, i.e., a digital twin of a diverse and heterogeneous area such as a city. In this paper, to illustrate our techniques, we focus our attention on the Indian city of Pune in the western state of Maharashtra. We use the digital twin to simulate various what-if scenarios of interest to (1) predict the spread of the virus; (2) understand the effectiveness of candidate interventions; and (3) predict the consequences of introduction of interventions possibly leading to trade-offs between public health, citizen comfort, and economy. Our model is configured for the specific city of interest and used as an in-silico experimentation aid to predict the trajectory of active infections, mortality rate, load on hospital, and quarantine facility centers for the candidate interventions. The key contributions of this paper are: (1) a novel agent-based model that seamlessly captures people, place, and movement characteristics of the city, COVID-19 virus characteristics, and primitive set of candidate interventions, and (2) a simulation-driven approach to determine the exact intervention that needs to be applied under a given set of circumstances. Although the analysis presented in the paper is highly specific to COVID-19, our tools are generic enough to serve as a template for modeling the impact of future pandemics and formulating bespoke intervention strategies.
| S-EPMC7845792 | biostudies-literature
Project description:During the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Non-Pharmaceutical and Pharmaceutical treatments were alternative strategies for governments to intervene. Though many of these intervention methods proved to be effective to stop the spread of COVID-19, i.e., lockdown and curfew, they also posed risk to the economy; in such a scenario, an analysis on how to strike a balance becomes urgent. Our research leverages the mobility big data from the University of Maryland COVID-19 Impact Analysis Platform and employs the Generalized Additive Model (GAM), to understand how the social demographic variables, NPTs (Non-Pharmaceutical Treatments) and PTs (Pharmaceutical Treatments) affect the New Death Rate (NDR) at county-level. We also portray the mutual and interactive effects of NPTs and PTs on NDR. Our results show that there exists a specific usage rate of PTs where its marginal effect starts to suppress the NDR growth, and this specific rate can be reduced through implementing the NPTs.
| S-EPMC8504736 | biostudies-literature
Project description:During the unprecedented coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) challenge, non-pharmaceutical interventions became a widely adopted strategy to limit physical movements and interactions to mitigate virus transmissions. For situational awareness and decision-support, quickly available yet accurate big-data analytics about human mobility and social distancing is invaluable to agencies and decision-makers. This paper presents a big-data-driven analytical framework that ingests terabytes of data on a daily basis and quantitatively assesses the human mobility trend during COVID-19. Using mobile device location data of over 150 million monthly active samples in the United States (U.S.), the study successfully measures human mobility with three main metrics at the county level: daily average number of trips per person; daily average person-miles traveled; and daily percentage of residents staying home. A set of generalized additive mixed models is employed to disentangle the policy effect on human mobility from other confounding effects including virus effect, socio-demographic effect, weather effect, industry effect, and spatiotemporal autocorrelation. Results reveal the policy plays a limited, time-decreasing, and region-specific effect on human movement. The stay-at-home orders only contribute to a 3.5%-7.9% decrease in human mobility, while the reopening guidelines lead to a 1.6%-5.2% mobility increase. Results also indicate a reasonable spatial heterogeneity among the U.S. counties, wherein the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, income levels, industry structure, age and racial distribution play important roles. The data informatics generated by the framework are made available to the public for a timely understanding of mobility trends and policy effects, as well as for time-sensitive decision support to further contain the spread of the virus.
| S-EPMC7796660 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The Covid-19 Pandemic Policy Monitor (COV-PPM) dataset prospectively documents non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) taken to contain SARS-Cov-2 transmission across countries in EU27, EEA and UK. In Germany, measures have also been recorded at the federal state and, partially, at the district levels. NPIs implemented since January 2020 have been retrieved and updated weekly from March 2020, from official governments webpages, Ministries of Health, National (Public) Health Institutes or Administrations. NPI categories collected refer to restrictions, closures or changes in functioning implemented in 13 domains: public events (gatherings in indoor or outdoor spaces); public institutions (kindergartens, schools, universities); public spaces (shops, bars, restaurants); public transport (trains, buses, trams, metro); citizens movement/mobility (e.g. pedestrians, cars, ships); border closures (air, land or sea, all incoming travels, from high-risk regions, only non-nationals); measures to improve the healthcare system (e.g. human resources or technical reinforcement, redistribution, material or infrastructural); measures for risk/vulnerable groups (e.g. elderly, chronically ill, pregnant); economic measures (e.g. lay-off rules establishment, actions to avoid job-loss, tax relaxation); testing policies (e.g. testing criteria changes); nose and mouth protection rules, vaccination and others/miscellaneous measures.
| S-EPMC8592638 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background and objectiveThe outbreak of the current pandemic begun from the first individual of a 55-year old from Hubei province in China, the disease instigated by the new coronavirus spreading across the world. Scientists presently speculate this coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, originated in a bat and by one way or another jumped to another creature, potentially the pangolin, which at that point gave it to people. The ailment is currently spreading between individuals with no animal delegate. Researchers are struggling to follow the infection back to where it started to become familiar with its spread. In the event that, for example, specialists can locate the soonest cases, they might have the option to distinguish the creature have where the infection hides. In March and April 2020, researchers detailed that this virus created normally. Coronavirus has been become of the serious global phenomena in the recent years and has negative effects in the entire world health and economy. The virus is believed to have been associated with a host animal which human contracted. Subsequently, human-to-human infection began. Through migration as humans have become complex with easy mobility the disease has traveled to the entire continent. Now, numerous scientist are going on in the hope of obtaining medication and vaccination to prevent the spread of the disease and mortality of the disease. It is important that we obtain quantitative and qualitative information about the etiology of this disease which is crucial. Mathematical modeling is capable of providing qualitative information on many parameters that guides the decision making of health practitioners. In this work we focus the optimal control of COVID-19 with the help of Non Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs). To find the role of factors/parameters in the transmission of the syndrome we find R0; the ratio of reproduction for the proposed model.MethodsTo find the role of parameters in the transmission of the syndrome we find R0; the ratio of reproduction for the proposed model. On the basis of sensitivity indices of the parameters we apply Non Pharmaceutical Interventions(NPIs) to control the sensitive parameters and hence formulate the optimal control mode. With the help of Hamiltonian and Lagrangian we minimize the density of contaminated stuff and infected human population.ResultsWe focus the optimal control of COVID-19 with the help of Non Pharmaceutical Interventions(NPIs). On the basis of sensitivity indices of the parameters we apply Non Pharmaceutical Interventions(NPIs) to control the sensitive parameters and hence formulate the optimal control model. The major NPIs are, STAY HOME, SANITIZER (wash hands), EARLY CASE DETECTION (PCR Test) and FACE MASK. These NPIs helps in mitigation and reducing the size of outbreak of the disease.ConclusionWe check the existence of the optimal solution for the system. At the end, Using matlab we produce numerical simulations for validation of results of control variables. The results demonstrate that if there is no control (variables/interventios), 900 out 1000 susceptible individuals may be infected (exposed) in very short period. As such a circumstances no agency fighting against COVID-19 could be successful due to its limited resources.
| S-EPMC7339477 | biostudies-literature