Modelling COVID-19 transmission in a hemodialysis centre using simulation generated contacts matrices
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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly threatening to patients with end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) on intermittent hemodialysis and their care providers. Hemodialysis patients who receive life-sustaining medical therapy in healthcare settings, face unique challenges as they need to be at a dialysis unit three or more times a week, where they are confined to specific settings and tended to by dialysis nurses and staff with physical interaction and in close proximity. Despite the importance and critical situation of the dialysis units, modelling studies of the SARS-CoV-2 spread in these settings are very limited. In this paper, we have used a combination of discrete event and agent-based simulation models, to study the operations of a typical large dialysis unit and generate contact matrices to examine outbreak scenarios. We present the details of the contact matrix generation process and demonstrate how the simulation calculates a micro-scale contact matrix comprising the number and duration of contacts at a micro-scale time step. We have used the contacts matrix in an agent-based model to predict disease transmission under different scenarios. The results show that micro-simulation can be used to estimate contact matrices, which can be used effectively for disease modelling in dialysis and similar settings.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.03.21249175: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is important to highlight some of the limitations of the current study that we are currently w orking on. As our contacts matrices have been developed based on one dialysis unit with a specific workflow, more simulations of this type in other units need to be developed to examine if the same contacts patterns exist. Having said that …
SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.03.21249175: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:It is important to highlight some of the limitations of the current study that we are currently w orking on. As our contacts matrices have been developed based on one dialysis unit with a specific workflow, more simulations of this type in other units need to be developed to examine if the same contacts patterns exist. Having said that our disease tran smission model allows for new contacts matrices to be used. Moreover, the contacts matrices generated in this study need to be validated against some real measurements which require field observations and measurements that were not possible under the ongo ing COVID-19 pandemic conditions. Fig. 8 Number of individuals exposed from a category (Title of each chart) over time (day) under different scenarios (Shown in the legend) such as: entering an asymptomatic person, without break, and random testing in the dialysis unit.
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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