Adaptive policies for use of physical distancing interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Published in: medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences
• Main Authors: Yaesoubi, Reza, Havumaki, Joshua, Chitwood, Melanie H, Menzies, Nicolas A, Gonsalves, Gregg, Salomon, Joshua, Paltiel, A David, Cohen, Ted
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 01.06.2020
• DOI: 10.1101/2020.05.29.20065714

Policymakers need decision tools to determine when to use physical distancing interventions to maximize the control of COVID-19 while minimizing the economic and social costs of these interventions. We develop a pragmatic decision tool to characterize adaptive policies that combine real-time surveillance data with clear decision rules to guide when to trigger, continue, or stop physical distancing interventions during the current pandemic. In model-based experiments, we find that adaptive policies characterized by our proposed approach prevent more deaths and require a shorter overall duration of physical distancing than alternative physical distancing policies. Our proposed approach can readily be extended to more complex models and interventions.