First 100 days of pandemic; an interplay of pharmaceutical, behavioral and digital interventions -- A study using agent based modeling
This research addresses pandemic response strategies for public health policymakers, offering insights into intervention trade-offs, but it is incremental as it applies existing modeling methods to specific data.
The study used agent-based modeling to simulate pharmaceutical, behavioral, and digital interventions during the first 100 days of a pandemic, finding that investing in behavioral and digital measures reduces infections and hospitalizations and delays the peak, with contact tracing and self-quarantine being more cost-efficient than vaccinations alone.
Pandemics, notably the recent COVID-19 outbreak, have impacted both public health and the global economy. A profound understanding of disease progression and efficient response strategies is thus needed to prepare for potential future outbreaks. In this paper, we emphasize the potential of Agent-Based Models (ABM) in capturing complex infection dynamics and understanding the impact of interventions. We simulate realistic pharmaceutical, behavioral, and digital interventions that mirror challenges in real-world policy adoption and suggest a holistic combination of these interventions for pandemic response. Using these simulations, we study the trends of emergent behavior on a large-scale population based on real-world socio-demographic and geo-census data from Kings County in Washington. Our analysis reveals the pivotal role of the initial 100 days in dictating a pandemic's course, emphasizing the importance of quick decision-making and efficient policy development. Further, we highlight that investing in behavioral and digital interventions can reduce the burden on pharmaceutical interventions by reducing the total number of infections and hospitalizations, and by delaying the pandemic's peak. We also infer that allocating the same amount of dollars towards extensive testing with contact tracing and self-quarantine offers greater cost efficiency compared to spending the entire budget on vaccinations.