What can we expect from the “new normality”? The Spatial Simulation research group developed the COVID-19 ABM model to evaluate alternative scenarios for the greater region of the City of Salzburg:
4 scenarios for the “new normality”
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- Continue the lockdown (yellow): this is the most effective intervention, but comes with hardly manageable social and economic restrictions that would last several months until full regional eradication.
- Relax the lockdown (red) in a step-wise approach, like the plan laid out by the Austrian government. This scenario eventually will result in a second outbreak.
- Adaptive management (blue) in this scenario, select lockdown restrictions are put back into place regionally, if necessary to avoid a second outbreak.
- Intensify contact tracing (green) to support the step-wise relaxation of the lockdown. Intensive contact tracing with the support of an app (like the “Stop Corona” app by the Austrian Red Cross) will allow to come back to high levels of social activities.
Herd immunity will not develop within the next few years. Simulations show that after 2 years, only about 5% of the population will be immune. By then we can hope that a vaccine will be available. Decision makers thus will have to balance between general interventions that apply to everybody and targeted containment that isolates only persons, who were in contact with infected persons. While the latter allows most of the population to come back to high levels of social and economic activity, it comes with severe privacy issues.
The source code of the model is published on COMSES under an open license:
Wallentin, Gudrun (2020, April 21). “COVID-19 ABM” (Version 1.0.1). CoMSES Computational Model Library. Retrieved from: CoMSES Open ABM model library
Sehr geehrte Frau Prof. Wallentin,
ich sah den Mittag-in-Österreich Beitrag und bin dankbar und erleichtert, anhand Ihrer Simulation zu verstehen, wie so ein Niedrighalten der Infektionsraten ablaufen könnte. Ich wollte Sie gerne fragen, ob in Ihrem Modell in Szenario 2 (relax) das Schließen der Schulen und tw der Kindergärten in den Sommerferien sowie die wahrscheinliche Reduktion von R0 durch Abstandhalten und Masken berücksichtigt wurde. Besten Dank, mit freundlichen Grüßen
Dear Ms Leithner!
let me reply in English. Your question was about whether we accounted for face masks and social distancing in our model.
We did account for that, but indirectly. The blueprint for the last step in the relax-lockdown scenario was actually Sweden (based on what was allowed and voluntarily reduced there, together with google’s mobility protocol). In the next improvement of the model, I would like to implement that more directly in the behaviour of agents.
In contrast to the short statement in TV, I do think that contact tracing (with or without the app) can be an important cornerstone IF we do it properly. Starting with explaining people, how important it is to report immediately if he / she feels sick. We have just 3 days to isolate contacts, or it will be +/- without effects. That also implies testing capacities and 24/7 hours work of tracing teams. I think now, as cases are low, it would be the ideal time to do it.
best, Gudrun