Behavioral Modelling

[mikkokotila]

Background

At the moment, the situation appears roughly as follows:

• behavior change interventions focus single dimensionally on epidemic effects
• a limited number of possible interventions have been considered
• at the moment interventions are considered as a single lump as opposed to stand-alone interventions
• while we know restrictions work, we don't know which restrictions work the best; there is not even a theoretical framework for robustly evaluating interventions
• intervention modeling assumes that countries are homogenous in terms of the effect

It seems fair to assume that such an approach leads to a suboptimal epidemic effect while causing severe economic and psychological damage. Simply put, the current approach, widely implemented throughout the globe, is an overly simplistic way to tackle the problem at hand.

A more meaningful situation would be:

• interventions focus on epidemic, economic, and psychological effects
• a large number of possible interventions have been considered
• interventions are considered individually, with further granularity per intervention
• there is a way to attribute the desired effect to a given intervention in comparison to other interventions (i.e. "pandemic mitigation attribution")
• a robust country-level weighting system for interventions is available

Examples

• Closing restaurants cause significant economic damage and some psychological damage. Instead of closing restaurants, a similar epidemic effect could be achieved by restricting capacity and imposing strict guidelines on restaurant owners, such as prohibiting buffets and any other cases where patrons are required to handle food with common utensils. This would entirely remove the psychological damage, limit economic damage, and would likely not be notably worse in terms of epidemic effect.
• At the moment grocery shops are open, and kindergartens are closed. The latter harms economy importantly; remote worker productivity suffers, and non-remote workers can't go to work. A small portion of households have kindergarten-age children, and kindergartens tend to be relatively small. In stark contrast, grocery shopping is heavily centralized (typically an entire town/locale goes to 2-3 shops) and every household frequently goes to the shop. If brick-and-mortar grocery shopping was replaced temporarily with delivery/pick-up/etc and special care was taken to make sure that nobody is left without a meaningful way to purchase groceries, there would be almost no economic effect, and the psychological effect would be notable. The epidemic effect would be far greater than what we get from closing kindergarten.

Proposal

Can we add two different models upstream from REINA:

• A country-specific weighting model overview
• A bespoke and highly granular behavioral model overview

For the latter, we have manually labeled each behavior for its perceived economic, psychological, and epidemic behavior. We then take probability distribution based on the individual labels, and using normally distributed random function, pick one to decide how much effect there will be.

Our vision is as follows:

• a person has a list of behaviors and can choose how much each will be restricted (0 to 100%)
• based on the inputs, the reproductive number is produced as an input to REINA
• at the end of the REINA simulation, economic damage, psychological damage, and a list of the effect that each behavior had on the outcomes