Flexible, Freely Available Stochastic Individual Contact Model for Exploring COVID-19 Intervention and Control Strategies: Development and Simulation.

Timothy Churches,Louisa Jorm

doi:10.2196/18965

Abstract

BackgroundThroughout March 2020, leaders in countries across the world were making crucial decisions about how and when to implement public health interventions to combat the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). They urgently needed tools to help them to explore what will work best in their specific circumstances of epidemic size and spread, and feasible intervention scenarios.ObjectiveWe sought to rapidly develop a flexible, freely available simulation model for use by modelers and researchers to allow investigation of how various public health interventions implemented at various time points might change the shape of the COVID-19 epidemic curve.Methods“COVOID” (COVID-19 Open-Source Infection Dynamics) is a stochastic individual contact model (ICM), which extends the ICMs provided by the open-source EpiModel package for the R statistical computing environment. To demonstrate its use and inform urgent decisions on March 30, 2020, we modeled similar intervention scenarios to those reported by other investigators using various model types, as well as novel scenarios. The scenarios involved isolation of cases, moderate social distancing, and stricter population “lockdowns” enacted over varying time periods in a hypothetical population of 100,000 people. On April 30, 2020, we simulated the epidemic curve for the three contiguous local areas (population 287,344) in eastern Sydney, Australia that recorded 5.3% of Australian cases of COVID-19 through to April 30, 2020, under five different intervention scenarios and compared the modeled predictions with the observed epidemic curve for these areas.ResultsCOVOID allocates each member of a population to one of seven compartments. The number of times individuals in the various compartments interact with each other and their probability of transmitting infection at each interaction can be varied to simulate the effects of interventions. Using COVOID on March 30, 2020, we were able to replicate the epidemic response patterns to specific social distancing intervention scenarios reported by others. The simulated curve for three local areas of Sydney from March 1 to April 30, 2020, was similar to the observed epidemic curve in terms of peak numbers of cases, total numbers of cases, and duration under a scenario representing the public health measures that were actually enacted, including case isolation and ramp-up of testing and social distancing measures.ConclusionsCOVOID allows rapid modeling of many potential intervention scenarios, can be tailored to diverse settings, and requires only standard computing infrastructure. It replicates the epidemic curves produced by other models that require highly detailed population-level data, and its predicted epidemic curve, using parameters simulating the public health measures that were enacted, was similar in form to that actually observed in Sydney, Australia. Our team and collaborators are currently developing an extended open-source COVOID package comprising of a suite of tools to explore intervention scenarios using several categories of models.

Highlights

March 2020 was a critical time in the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, when political leaders and policy makers were making crucial decisions that would shape the lives and futures of people and communities
COVID-19 Open-Source Infection Dynamics central processing unit (CPU) (COVOID) allows rapid modeling of many potential intervention scenarios, can be tailored to diverse settings, and requires only standard computing infrastructure. It replicates the epidemic curves produced by other models that require highly detailed population-level data, and its predicted epidemic curve, using parameters simulating the public health measures that were enacted, was similar in form to that observed in Sydney, Australia
The twelve simulations reported in this paper were each run eight times and the results averaged, taking approximately 60 minutes to complete when running in parallel on an eight-core Intel central processing unit (CPU)

Summary

Introduction

March 2020 was a critical time in the global coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, when political leaders and policy makers were making crucial decisions that would shape the lives and futures of people and communities. Stochastic individual contact models (ICMs), known as individual-based or agent-based models, are increasingly used for epidemic simulation modeling These models represent individual units in the population and the contacts between them as discrete events and capture the stochasticity seen in real-world disease outbreaks. Throughout March 2020, leaders in countries across the world were making crucial decisions about how and when to implement public health interventions to combat the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). They urgently needed tools to help them to explore what will work best in their specific circumstances of epidemic size and spread, and feasible intervention scenarios

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Discussion

Conclusion