An Agent-Based Model to Support Infection Control Strategies at School

Abstract

Many governments enforced physical distancing measures during the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid the collapse of often fragile and overloaded health care systems. Following the physical distancing measures, school closures seemed unavoidable to keep the transmission of the pathogen under control, given the potentially high-risk of these environments. Nevertheless, closing schools was considered an extreme and the last resort of governments, and so various non-pharmaceutical interventions in schools were implemented to reduce the risk of transmission. By means of an agent-based model, we studied the efficacy of active surveillance strategies in the school environment. Simulations settings provided hypothetical although realistic scenarios which allowed us to identify the most suitable control strategy to avoid massive school closures while adapting to contagion dynamics. Reducing risk by means of public policies explored in our study is essential for both health authorities and school administrators.

Effectiveness of social distancing measures and lockdowns for reducing transmission of COVID-19 in non-healthcare, community-based settings

“…Another ecological study examining schools in North Carolina and Wisconsin, US, from 2020 to 2021 did not observe an increase in the secondary transmission rate in schools after distancing measures were relaxed, indicating they had no effect on transmission in these schools [149]. The remaining simulation studies found that school measures were associated with reductions in public health impacts of COVID-19, both in the schools [156–158,160,162–166] and the community [155,159,161].…”

“…Eighteen included studies estimated the effectiveness of school measures (not including closures) to reduce the impact of COVID-19. Six were observational studies [149][150][151][152][153][154] and 12 were simulation studies [155][156][157][158][159][160][161][162][163][164][165][166]. Most studies were carried out in 2020 at a sub-national scale (electronic supplementary material, appendix C).…”

“…Most studies were carried out in 2020 at a sub-national scale (electronic supplementary material, appendix C). Seven of these studies estimated the effect of school measures in combination with the mandatory or recommended use of face masks [149,[151][152][153]155,157,160].…”

A synthetic population for agent-based modelling in Canada

“…The predominant methodology in this area is Agent-Based Modelling (ABM), an approach which involves modelling heterogeneous individual agents who act and interact autonomously. ABM has been recently applied to urban planning 2,3 , future transportation [4][5][6] , policy evaluation [7][8][9] or simulating disease outbreaks and interventions 10,11 . Frameworks for developing ABMs, such as MATSim 12 and AIMSUN 13 for transportation, and Repast and NetLogo, have support these applications.…”