Population

Post questions about using SimPandemic, including any suggestions for product updates

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ddet
Posts: 1
Joined: Sat May 09, 2020 1:41 pm
Occupation: Parent

Population

Post by ddet »

It would be nice to see some additional customization with the populations:

For example, the age range 18-64 is pretty broad, especially when considering "above 60" is high risk.

One recent article from The Journal of allergy and clinical immunology, 12 April 2020, "Risk factors for severity and mortality in adult COVID-19 inpatients in Wuhan" splits it up from 0-44yrs, 44-64, >65. That study is looking at adults specifically, but additional population age customization would allow for modeling with more varied hospitalization rates as age increases.

The other population improvement that would be nice is somewhere, maybe next to the graph, an input for the total population. This would allow a more intuitive look at the data because most people don't think in "per 100,000" numbers. If the population of the U.S. is 340ish million people, and I see 250 million people infected, that could be more impactful.

I ran into these issues when trying to validate SimPandemic against data available from JHU for Italy.

Otherwise, a very interesting tool!

Dan
KenHess
Posts: 8
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2020 2:45 pm
Occupation: Science Buddies Founder
Project Question: NA
Project Due Date: NA
Project Status: Not applicable

Re: Population

Post by KenHess »

Thanks very much for the feedback. We'll add your suggestions to the potential enhancements list.

In the mean time, there is a possible workaround to your suggestion on age categories. The population "bucket" labels are just that, labels. If you only need four buckets, you can assign them any age ranges (or other characteristics, like comorbidity) that you want. You just need to do it consistently for both the population statistics and the disease characteristics. Of course, the labels won't change -- you would just be assigning your own meaning to them and would have to keep track of that. If you need more than four buckets, this won't work.

Ken
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