The Epidemiology Workbench: a Tool for Communities to Strategize in Response to COVID-19 and other Infectious Diseases

  1. Santiago Núñez-Corrales
  2. Eric Jakobsson

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Abstract

COVID-19 poses a dramatic challenge to health, community life, and the economy of communities across the world. While the properties of the virus are similar from place to place, the impact has been dramatically different from place to place, due to such factors as population density, mobility, age distribution, etc. Thus, optimum testing and social distancing strategies may also be different from place to place. The Epidemiology Workbench provides access to an agent-based model in which a community’s demographic, geographic, and public health information together with a social distancing and testing strategy may be input, and a range of possible outcomes computed, to inform local authorities on coping strategies. The model is adaptable to other infectious diseases, and to other strains of coronavirus. The tool is illustrated by scenarios for the cities of Urbana and Champaign, Illinois, the home of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Our calculations suggest that massive testing is the most effective strategy to combat the likely increase in local cases due to mass ingress of a student population carrying a higher viral load than that currently present in the community.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.22.20159798: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.22.20159798 on medRxiv