Using a real-world network to model the tradeoff between stay-at-home restriction, vaccination, social distancing and working hours on COVID-19 dynamics
Abstract
Background
Human behavior, economic activity, vaccination, and social distancing are inseparably entangled in epidemic management. This study aims to investigate the effects of various parameters such as stay-at-home restrictions, work hours, vaccination and social distance on the containment of pandemics such as COVID-19.
Methods
To achieve this, we developed an agent-based model based on a time-dynamic graph with stochastic transmission events. The graph is constructed from a real-world social network. The graph’s edges have been categorized into three categories: home, workplaces, and social environment. The conditions needed to mitigate the spread of wild-type (WT) COVID-19 and the delta variant have been analyzed. Our purposeful agent-based model has carefully executed tens of thousands of individual-based simulations. We propose simple relationships for the trade-offs between effective reproduction number ( R e ), transmission rate, work hours, vaccination, and stay at home restrictions.
Results
For the WT, it has been found that a 13% increase in vaccination impacts the reproduction number, like the magnitude of decreasing nine hours of work to four and a single day of stay-at-home order. For the delta, 16% vaccination has the same effect. Also, since we can keep track of household and non-household infections, we observed that the change in household transmission rate does not significantly alter the R e . Household infections are not limited by transmission rate due to the high frequency of connections. For COVID-19’s specifications, the R e depends on the non-household transmissions rate.
Conclusions
All measures are worth considering. Vaccination and transmission reduction are almost interchangeable. Without vaccination or teaching people how to lower their transmission probability significantly, changing work hours or weekend restrictions will only make people more frustrated
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