An agent-based epidemic model REINA for COVID-19 to identify destructive policies

Jouni T Tuomisto; Juha Yrjölä; Mikko Kolehmainen; Juhani Bonsdorff; Jami Pekkanen; Tero Tikkanen

An agent-based model has a few putative advantages over the traditional models described above. First, there is more flexibility to model certain types of micro-level processes and policy decisions of high practical interest. In particular, modelling of different testing and contact tracing approaches can be done with better precision and ease in agent-based models. In addition, an agent-based model leads naturally to a very straightforward representation of R 0 (and more generally R t ) in terms of the infectivity of the pathogen and the interaction characterics of the population. While the former should be largely a property of the pathogen itself, the latter varies across countries. An agent-based model thus lends itself to analysing cross-country variations of epidemic dynamics.