Population simulations of COVID-19 outbreaks provide tools for risk assessment and continuity planning

Peng, Bo; Pettit, Rowland W; Amos, Christopher I

OBJECTIVES: We developed COVID-19 Outbreak Simulator (https://ictr.github.io/covid19-outbreak-simulator/) to quantitatively estimate the effectiveness of preventative and interventive measures to prevent and battle COVID-19 outbreaks for specific populations. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our simulator simulates the entire course of infection and transmission of the virus among individuals in heterogeneous populations, subject to operations and influences, such as quarantine, testing, social distancing, and community infection. It provides command-line and Jupyter notebook interfaces and a plugin system for user-defined operations. RESULTS: The simulator provides quantitative estimates for COVID-19 outbreaks in a variety of scenarios and assists the development of public health policies, risk-reduction operations, and emergency response plans. DISCUSSION: Our simulator is powerful, flexible, and customizable, although successful applications require realistic estimation and robustness analysis of population-specific parameters. CONCLUSION: Risk assessment and continuity planning for COVID-19 outbreaks are crucial for the continued operation of many organizations. Our simulator will be continuously expanded to meet this need.