Abstract
Background: Community containment is one of the common methods used to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks. The effectiveness of such a method depends on how strictly it is applied and the timing of its implementation. An early start and being strict is very effective; however, at the same time, it impacts freedom and economic opportunity. Here we created a simulation model to understand the effect of the starting day of community containment on the final outcome, that is, the number of those infected, hospitalized and those that died, as we followed the dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We used a stochastic recursive simulation method to apply disease outbreak dynamics measures of COVID-19 as an example to simulate disease spread. Parameters are allowed to be randomly assigned between higher and lower values obtained from published COVID-19 literature. Results: We simulated the dynamics of COVID-19 spread, calculated the number of active infections, hospitalizations and deaths as the outcome of our simulation and compared these results with real world data. We also represented the details of the spread in a network graph structure, and shared the code for the simulation model to be used for examining other variables. Conclusions: Early implementation of community containment has a big impact on the final outcome of an outbreak.
Highlights
As a public health tool, community containment measures are employed to curb/slow the spread of infectious disease outbreaks inside communities, regions, and cities
Simulation model The created simulation code is available at www.github.com/ attayeb/corona_simulation/9
It is a simple python script that takes input of two items, the details of first patient and the simulation parameters which need to be inserted in form of a python dictionary
Summary
As a public health tool, community containment measures are employed to curb/slow the spread of infectious disease outbreaks inside communities, regions, and cities. It is considered a last resort when all other tools such as case-isolation and quarantine fail to yield the required results[1]. Community containment is one of the common methods used to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks The effectiveness of such a method depends on how strictly it is applied and the timing of its implementation. We created a simulation model to understand the effect of the starting day of community containment on the final outcome, that is, the number of those infected, hospitalized and those that died, as we followed the dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions: Early implementation of community containment has a big impact on the final outcome of an outbreak
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