New COVID-19 Simulator Aims to Guide State Back-to-Work Planning
In This Article
- Researchers have developed an online COVID-19 Simulator that can help policymakers envision the impacts of various social distancing decisions
- According to Jagpreet Chhatwal, PhD, lead investigator on the simulator, the tool can help facilitate more effective and faster-paced decision-making, leading to positive impacts on the evolution of COVID-19
- As more is learned about this disease, researchers will advance their approach
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Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Georgia Tech have developed an online tool that can help policymakers make effective public health decisions surrounding the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Lead Investigator Jagpreet Chhatwal, PhD, a senior scientist at the Mass General Institute for Technology Assessment, said with policymakers needing to make decisions quickly, their analysis shows a week's time can have a huge impact on the trajectory of the disease. He said the researchers developed the COVID-19 Simulator to inform such key decisions in this uncertain environment.
Using the most recent data for each state and infectious disease modeling, the COVID-19 Simulator demonstrates the impact of lifting or extending different social distancing measures in terms of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths across states. It also gives views of intrastate, interstate and nation-level trends for the United States under varying intervention policies.
Developing a prediction model for COVID-19 is not easy, largely because much is still unknown about the disease. The researchers note that they plan to use new data as it becomes available to advance their approach.
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