With so many COVID-19 models being developed, how do policymakers know which ones to use? A new process to harness multiple disease models for outbreak management has been developed by an international team of researchers.
The team describes the process in a paper appearing May 8 in the journal Science, and was awarded a Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) from the National Science Foundation to immediately implement the process to help inform policy decisions for the COVID-19 outbreak.
“In order to improve modeling and analysis of epidemic disease, it is essential to develop protocols that deliberately generate and evaluate valuable individual ideas from across the modeling community,” said Michael Runge, a research ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center Center who specializes in decision analysis for wildlife management. “We have identified best practices that allow the synthesis of input from multiple modeling groups in an efficient and timely manner.”
In the three-part process, multiple research groups first create models for specified management scenarios, for example, addressing how caseload would be affected if social isolation measures were lifted this summer, or how the duration of the outbreak would change if students return to school in the fall. The research groups work independently during this step to encourage a wide range of ideas without prematurely conforming to a certain way of thinking. Then, the modeling groups formally discuss their models with each other — an important addition to previous multiple model methods — which allows them to examine why their models might disagree. Finally, the groups work independently again to refine their models, based on the insights from the discussion and comparison stage.
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