Predicting COVID-19 transmission to inform the management of mass events: a model-based approach
| Autor: | David Liu, Tõnu Esko, Austen El-Osta, Claire Donnat, Jack Kreindler, Filippos T. Filippidis, Freddy Bunbury, Matthew Harris |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Estimation
Original Paper SARS-CoV-2 Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Public Health Environmental and Occupational Health COVID-19 Health Informatics Disease Outbreaks Neglect transmission dynamics Transmission (telecommunications) Statistics Humans Tail risk Duration (project management) Risk assessment live event management Monte Carlo simulation Event (probability theory) media_common Quantile |
| Zdroj: | JMIR Public Health and Surveillance |
| Popis: | Background Modelling COVID-19 transmission at live events and public gatherings is essential to controlling the probability of subsequent outbreaks and communicating to participants their personalized risk. Yet, despite the fast-growing body of literature on COVID-19 transmission dynamics, current risk models either neglect contextual information including vaccination rates or disease prevalence or do not attempt to quantitatively model transmission. Objective This paper attempted to bridge this gap by providing informative risk metrics for live public events, along with a measure of their uncertainty. Methods Building upon existing models, our approach ties together 3 main components: (1) reliable modelling of the number of infectious cases at the time of the event, (2) evaluation of the efficiency of pre-event screening, and (3) modelling of the event’s transmission dynamics and their uncertainty using Monte Carlo simulations. Results We illustrated the application of our pipeline for a concert at the Royal Albert Hall and highlighted the risk’s dependency on factors such as prevalence, mask wearing, and event duration. We demonstrate how this event held on 3 different dates (August 20, 2020; January 20, 2021; and March 20, 2021) would likely lead to transmission events that are similar to community transmission rates (0.06 vs 0.07, 2.38 vs 2.39, and 0.67 vs 0.60, respectively). However, differences between event and background transmissions substantially widened in the upper tails of the distribution of the number of infections (as denoted by their respective 99th quantiles: 1 vs 1, 19 vs 8, and 6 vs 3, respectively, for our 3 dates), further demonstrating that sole reliance on vaccination and antigen testing to gain entry would likely significantly underestimate the tail risk of the event. Conclusions Despite the unknowns surrounding COVID-19 transmission, our estimation pipeline opens the discussion on contextualized risk assessment by combining the best tools at hand to assess the order of magnitude of the risk. Our model can be applied to any future event and is presented in a user-friendly RShiny interface. Finally, we discussed our model’s limitations as well as avenues for model evaluation and improvement. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
|