ABSTRACT
Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) for contact suppression have been widely used worldwide, which impose harmful burdens on the well-being of populations and the local economy. The evaluation of alternative NPIs is needed to confront the pandemic with less disruption. By harnessing human mobility data, we develop an agent-based model that can evaluate the efficacies of NPIs with individualized mobility simulations. Based on the model, we propose data-driven targeted interventions to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic in Hong Kong without city-wide NPIs. We develop a data-driven agent-based model for 7.55 million Hong Kong residents to evaluate the efficacies of various NPIs in the first 80 days of the initial outbreak. The entire territory of Hong Kong has been split into 4905 500m x 500m grids. The model can simulate detailed agent interactions based on the demographics data, public facilities and functional buildings, transportation systems, and travel patterns. The general daily human mobility patterns are adopted from Google’s Community Mobility Report. The scenario without any NPIs is set as the baseline. By simulating the epidemic progression and human movement at the individual level, we propose model-driven targeted interventions which focus on the surgical testing and quarantine of only a small portion of regions instead of enforcing NPIs in the whole city. The effectiveness of common NPIs and the proposed targeted interventions are evaluated by 100 extensive simulations. The proposed model can inform targeted interventions, which are able to effectively contain the COVID-19 outbreak with much lower disruption of the city. It represents a promising approach to sustainable NPIs to help us revive the economy of the city and the world.
BIOGRAPHY
Qingpeng Zhang is an Associate Professor with the School of Data Science, City University of Hong Kong. He received the B.S. degree in Automation from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2009, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Systems and Industrial Engineering from The University of Arizona, in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Prior to joining CityU, he did postdoc research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and also worked for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Chinese Academy of Sciences as PhD intern. His research interests include healthcare data analytics, medical informatics, network science, social computing, data mining, machine learning, and semantic web.
Date & Time
Venue
Chair