Social Distancing Effectiveness and Improved Therapies
Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2020 1:09 am
Hi,
I'm preparing to do a summer program with high school students, and look forward to using SimPandemic with them. I'm trying to explore lots of scenarios in preparation. So far, I've gotten two unexpected results, and I was hoping to ask if these are due to simplifications in the simulation parameters (I fully understand that these are needed for computational efficiency!) or if I'm simply failing to understand the results.
First, I was exploring the impact of very effective social distancing for the elderly, and I expected that this would cause reduced infection in the elderly and therefore a drop in the death rate. However, I did not see that. To ensure that this was not due to chance with small values, I compared social distancing effectiveness of 50 vs. 99% for the elderly bucket (75% effectiveness for all others), with a 90% death rate for that bucket (all other parameters set at default values). In both cases, death rate was very high (about 2300). The only explanation I could figure out was that there is not a direct, bucket-specific link between infection probability and social distancing effectiveness.
Second, the impact of improved therapies appears to be independent of hospitalization (i.e., improved therapies have the same impact whether the hospitals are above capacity or not). Is that correct?
This is a really great tool--thank you for making it available!
I'm preparing to do a summer program with high school students, and look forward to using SimPandemic with them. I'm trying to explore lots of scenarios in preparation. So far, I've gotten two unexpected results, and I was hoping to ask if these are due to simplifications in the simulation parameters (I fully understand that these are needed for computational efficiency!) or if I'm simply failing to understand the results.
First, I was exploring the impact of very effective social distancing for the elderly, and I expected that this would cause reduced infection in the elderly and therefore a drop in the death rate. However, I did not see that. To ensure that this was not due to chance with small values, I compared social distancing effectiveness of 50 vs. 99% for the elderly bucket (75% effectiveness for all others), with a 90% death rate for that bucket (all other parameters set at default values). In both cases, death rate was very high (about 2300). The only explanation I could figure out was that there is not a direct, bucket-specific link between infection probability and social distancing effectiveness.
Second, the impact of improved therapies appears to be independent of hospitalization (i.e., improved therapies have the same impact whether the hospitals are above capacity or not). Is that correct?
This is a really great tool--thank you for making it available!