Using a real-world network to model the trade-off between stay-at-home restriction, vaccination, social distancing and working hours on COVID-19 dynamics

Ramin Nashebi, Murat Sari, Seyfullah Kotil*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Background. Human behaviour, economic activity, vaccination, and social distancing are inseparably entangled in epidemic management. This study aims to investigate the effects of various parameters such as stay-at-home restrictions, work hours, vaccination, and social distance on the containment of pandemics such as COVID-19. Methods. To achieve this, we have developed an agent based model based on a time-dynamic graph with stochastic transmission events. The graph is constructed from a real-world social network. The edges of graph have been categorized into three categories: home, workplaces, and social environment. The conditions needed to mitigate the spread of wild-type COVID-19 and the delta variant have been analyzed. Our purposeful agent based model has carefully executed tens of thousands of individual-based simulations. We propose simple relationships for the trade-offs between effective reproduction number (Re), transmission rate, working hours, vaccination, and stay-at-home restrictions. Results. We have found that the effect of a 13.6% increase in vaccination for wild-type (WT) COVID-19 is equivalent to reducing four hours of work or a one-day stay-at-home restriction. For the delta, 20.2% vaccination has the same effect. Also, since we can keep track of household and non-household infections, we observed that the change in household transmission rate does not significantly alter the Re. Household infections are not limited by transmission rate due to the high frequency of connections. For the specifications of COVID-19, the Re depends on the non-household transmissions rate. Conclusions. Our findings highlight that decreasing working hours is the least effective among the non-pharmaceutical interventions. Our results suggest that policymakers decrease work-related activities as a last resort and should probably not do so when the effects are minimal, as shown. Furthermore, the enforcement of stay-at-home restrictions is moderately effective and can be used in conjunction with other measures if absolutely necessary.

Original languageEnglish
Article number14353
JournalPeerJ
Volume10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2022

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright 2022 Nashebi et al.

Funding

This work was supported by TUBITAK, 2232 - International Fellowship for Outstanding Researchers, Project number 118C244. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

FundersFunder number
Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu118C244

    Keywords

    • Agent-based model
    • COVID-19
    • Household transmission
    • Pandemic
    • Social network
    • Stay-at-home policy
    • Working hours

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