Smaller cities and towns with a shortage of intensive care units and limited budgets need effective precautions.
Research officers from the NYU Tandon School of Engineering have developed a new open-source platform capable of creating predictive models of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) based on aggregated data from numerous observations in different strata of society . The study was published in the journal Advanced theory and simulations.
The study was conducted in the city of New Rochelle in New York, selected because of its comparison with other cities in the United States and due to the fact that it was one of the first outbreaks in the country.
“We chose New Rochelle not only because of its place in the COVID timeline, but also because agent-based modeling for medium-sized towns is relatively unexplored, despite the fact that the US largely consists of such towns and small towns,” he said. Maurizio Porfiri, the leader behind, said the research team.
The researchers used the agent-based model (ABM) to retrieve the geographic and demographic information collected about the city from U.S. census statistics. Subsequently, they placed a temporary and spatial high-resolution representation of the COVID-19 pandemic on an individual level, with features such as physical locations, behavioral trends, and local mobility patterns.
Findings from the study suggest that prioritizing individuals at high risk for vaccination has only a marginal impact on the total number of deaths caused by the COVID-19 virus. Investigators said large factions need to be vaccinated to see significant improvements. They also showed that restrictive measures such as social distance, mask wear, and mobility restrictions outweighed any selective vaccination scenarios.
The model used is unique in that it has the potential to explore different approaches to hospital testing, and to implement facilities and strategies prioritized by vulnerable groups.
“We think that decision-making by public authorities can benefit from this model, not only because it is ‘open source’, but also because it provides a ‘fine-grained’ solution at the level of the individual and a wide range of functions. , “Porfiri said.