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This model simulates illness spreading, children and adults going from home to public places, with surveillance, and agencies with the authority to close schools. It is meant to be very simple, to stimulate thinking about adaptive response.
In this draft model, any of three agencies may have the authority to close school. We may authorize any or all of these agencies to close schools. So you can try turning the authority to close school "on" or “off.” Once you switch that on, kids will no longer go to school, if the threshold of sick children is large enough. Right now that slider just sets the threshold as a number of sick children. You can have sick people stay home on the weekends, and see what effect that has on the spread of infection. You can have a certain proportion of sick adults decide to stay home from work. And you can try different combinations of all of the above, or compare different strategies and see which is most effective in mitigating the spread of infection. (Keep in mind that school closings and staying home from work are not have costs of their own).
After you hit the “setup” button you see homes, a school, a workplace, a park, hospital and health department appear. Children and adults populate the homes. See people move to public places: schools, work (and on the weekends they go to shops and the park—there is a window telling you the day of the week, and a window showing how many days have elapsed and showing the spread of infection).
Hit the “infect” button whenever you want to initiate an infection. Watch the infection spread. You can use the sliders to change settings. You can change the infection rate and duration.
You can give the health department the authority to close the school by switching that setting “on.” Or you can turn it off. You can add a delay to any school closing.
Hit setup. Hit Go. Hit infect.
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At a very basic level adaptation is about keeping up with change in the environment. For example, does change in the response system keep up with a increase in infections? These types of questions are easier to talk about with a simple dynamic model.
My draft model simulates illness spreading, children and adults going from home to public places, with surveillance, and agencies with the authority to close schools. It is meant to be very simple, to stimulate thinking about adaptive response.
This simple “toy” model is an early attempt to create simulations in a format that anybody can use. This format allows partners to view and modify some parameters of the simulation through a web browser.
In this draft model, any of three agencies may have the authority to close school. We may authorize any or all of these agencies to close schools.
So you can try turning the authority to close school "on" or “off.” Once you switch that on, kids will no longer go to school, if the threshold of sick children is large enough. Right now that slider just sets the threshold as a number of sick children.
You can have sick people stay home on the weekends, and see what effect that has on the spread of infection. You can have a certain proportion of sick adults decide to stay home from work. And you can try different combinations of all of the above, or compare different strategies and see which is most effective in mitigating the spread of infection. (Keep in mind that school closings and staying home from work are not have costs of their own).
After you hit the “setup” button you see homes, a school, a workplace, a park, hospital and health department appear. Children and adults populate the homes.
See people move to public places: schools, work (and on the weekends they go to shops and the park—there is a window telling you the day of the week, and a window showing how many days have elapsed and showing the spread of infection).
Hit the “infect” button whenever you want to initiate an infection. Watch the infection spread. You can use the sliders to change settings. You can change the infection rate and duration.
You can give the health department the authority to close the school by switching that setting “on.” Or you can turn it off. You can add a delay to any school closing.
Once the threshold of sick children is reached, the health department signals an alert.
Each of the three agencies (the department of education, and the emergency management agency, and the health department) might have the authority to close school. But they might have different criteria for closing down the schools. So here we have a separate slider for each of the three departments. So the user can set the department of education at a different threshold, a different number of children can get sick before the department of education’s alert goes off. Same with the emergency management agency.
So with different thresholds we see the alerts go off successively. First the health department, then the department of education, then the emergency management agency alert. But the school only closes if the agency also has the authority to close the schools. We don’t see that happen in the movie because the authority is not switched on.
The modeling program records each run along with the parameters that were set at that time. The proportion infected over time for each run is displayed as a plot and recorded. The model produces slightly different results with each run, because some randomness is built into the simulation. So we record average results over many simulation runs. That allows us to see patterns emerge over many runs, for any given settings. For example, if there is a different criterion operating for school closure authority between the education department and the health department, then delay in closure is likely to occur and more children will become infected.
Authored by Christopher Keane.
Inspired by the elegant models of Josh Epstein, my mentor in modeling.