Facemask and social distancing, pillars of opening up economies

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe health and economic impacts globally. Strategies to safely reopen economies, travel and trade are a high priority. Until a reliable vaccine is available, non-pharmaceutical techniques are the only available means of disease control. In this paper, we aim to evaluate the extent to which social distancing (SD) and facemask (FM) use can mitigate the transmission of COVID-19 when restrictions are lifted. We used a microsimulation activity-based model for Sydney Greater Metropolitan Area, to evaluate the power of SD and FM in controlling the pandemic under numerous scenarios. The hypothetical scenarios are designed to picture feasible futures under different assumptions. Assuming that the isolation of infected cases and the quarantining of close contacts are in place, different numerical tests are conducted and a full factorial two-way MANOVA test is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the FM and SD control strategies. The main and interactive effects of the containment strategies are evaluated by the total number of infections, percentage of infections reduction, the time it takes to get the pandemic under control, and the intensity of active cases.

Easing or tightening control strategies: determination of COVID-19 parameters for an agent-based model

“…Several agent-based models have been developed to simulate the spread of COVID-19 and evaluates the effectiveness of having various control strategies in place; the strategies include social distancing (Chang et al, 2020 ; Najmi et al, 2021 ), school closure (Chang et al, 2020 ; Truszkowska et al, 2021 ), facemask usage (Najmi et al, 2021 ; Müller et al, 2021 ), contact tracing (Aleta et al, 2020 ; Kerr et al, 2020 ), quarantining family members of isolated cases (Kerr et al, 2020 ; Chang et al, 2020 ), superspreading (Lau et al, 2020 ), and lockdown (Chang et al, 2020 ; Truszkowska et al, 2021 ). The agent-based models are developed for various locations including Australia (Chang et al, 2020 ), Singapore (Koo et al, 2020 ), the United States (Chao et al, 2020 ), and the United Kingdom (Ferguson et al, 2020 ).…”

“…The agent-based models are developed for various locations including Australia (Chang et al, 2020 ), Singapore (Koo et al, 2020 ), the United States (Chao et al, 2020 ), and the United Kingdom (Ferguson et al, 2020 ). Features of these models include the simulation of in-home and out-of-home contacts (Chao et al, 2020 ; Kretzschmar et al, 2021 ; Kucharski et al, 2020 ), activity participation of agents (Chang et al, 2020 ; Müller et al, 2021 ), activity chains (Müller et al, 2021 ), and travel networks (Najmi et al, 2021 ). Our disease transmission model in this paper covers all the features and attempts to investigate effectiveness of the above-mentioned control strategies, except the school closure, in the Sydney GMA.…”

“…In Appendix 3 , we describe the parameter calibration procedure used to determine the parameters for the agent-based disease spread models and present the resulting calibrated parameters in Table 2 . The parameter calibration procedure is based on previously published work by Najmi et al ( 2020 ).…”

“…1 ). This mathematical representation may correspond to different orders of polynomial functions (Najmi et al, 2020 ). In this paper, we choose the order of polynomial corner points of each equation based on a fitness function value for the estimated equations.…”

“…For more information about different experimental designs and the required number of experiments to be run, the reader is referred to Myers et al ( 2009 ) and Ranade and Thiagarajan ( 2017 ). Furthermore, we refer the interested readers to Najmi et al ( 2020 ) where an application of the CCD model to calibrate an agent-based model is discussed.

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