“Modeling is just a way of representing relationships in the world,” said Tse Yang Lim, who led the study and is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We use mathematical formulas to understand cause-and-effect relationships by observing phenomena, estimating variables, and obtaining data. We then use that data to ground our models. , when it comes to the coronavirus, you can ask questions like how many people will get infected, how many people will die in a certain period of time, etc.”
Lim added: “We can use real-world data, such as the number of infections and deaths reported in different countries over different time periods, to estimate how people will behave. ” he added.
The team’s models are developed by collecting data on individual and group behaviors and building algorithms that capture the underlying patterns of these behaviors. By predicting potential outcomes, these models allow public health officials to make the best decisions to keep people safe.
“When we ask questions like how does COVID-19 spread? There are often a lot of values, data, and numbers that go into those equations. It can be very complex,” says the study. intentionally used a simpler model rather than a more sophisticated model to help distill the core idea: When an outbreak occurs and the number of coronavirus cases increases, , people will reduce their contacts. They are taking more precautions, but there are delays because it takes time for these numbers to be reported,” Lim said. Ta. “As the death toll rises and people take more precautions, the rate at which people come into contact with each other, and therefore potentially spread the disease, will decrease. But how quickly will they Do they reduce their contact with each other? It depends on the behavioral parameters of reactivity.”
Understanding this relationship is what the research team is currently working on. Ultimately, data shows that as the death toll rises, people eventually change their behavior, even if they initially don’t follow guidelines or are reluctant to make major changes to their daily lives. I am.
“In order to know how people will react to future epidemics and pandemics, we need to collect information about how humans react to different situations,” Ghaffarzadegan said. said. “For example, what drives people to choose whether or not to wear a mask? What causes people to exit quarantine early due to compliance fatigue? In a nutshell, our research deals with linking models of human behavior and models of infectious diseases.”