Abstract
BackgroundPlanning public health responses against pandemic influenza relies on predictive models by which the impact of different intervention strategies can be evaluated. Research has to date rather focused on producing predictions for certain localities or under specific conditions, than on designing a publicly available planning tool which can be applied by public health administrations. Here, we provide such a tool which is reproducible by an explicitly formulated structure and designed to operate with an optimal combination of the competing requirements of precision, realism and generality.ResultsInfluSim is a deterministic compartment model based on a system of over 1,000 differential equations which extend the classic SEIR model by clinical and demographic parameters relevant for pandemic preparedness planning. It allows for producing time courses and cumulative numbers of influenza cases, outpatient visits, applied antiviral treatment doses, hospitalizations, deaths and work days lost due to sickness, all of which may be associated with economic aspects. The software is programmed in Java, operates platform independent and can be executed on regular desktop computers.ConclusionInfluSim is an online available software which efficiently assists public health planners in designing optimal interventions against pandemic influenza. It can reproduce the infection dynamics of pandemic influenza like complex computer simulations while offering at the same time reproducibility, higher computational performance and better operability.
Highlights
Planning public health responses against pandemic influenza relies on predictive models by which the impact of different intervention strategies can be evaluated
Published influenza models which came into application, are represented by two extremes: generalized but oversimplified models without dynamic structure which are publicly available (e.g. [4]), and complex computer simulations which are adjusted to real conditions and/or are not publicly available (e.g. [5,6])
Transmission between these age classes is based on a contact matrix (Table 3) which is scaled such that the model with standard parameter values yields a given basic reproduction number R0
Summary
We provide some examples of model output of InfluSim [8], version 2.0, by means of four sensitivity analyses; further investigations will be presented elsewhere. Incidence of up to 2,340 influenza patients seeking medical help, with up to 280 hospital beds occupied by influenza cases and with up to 14,000 out of 60,000 working adults unable to go to work because of illness or convalescence. These results depend on the assumptions concerning the yet unknown contagiousness and pathogenicity of the virus.
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