Fast screening framework for infection control scenario identification.

Due to the emergence of the novel coronavirus disease, many recent studies have investigated prediction methods for infectious disease transmission. This paper proposes a framework to quickly screen infection control scenarios and identify the most effective scheme for reducing the number of infected individuals. Analytical methods, as typified by the SIR model, can conduct trial-and-error verification with low computational costs; however, they must be reformulated to introduce additional constraints, and thus are inappropriate for case studies considering detailed constraint parameters. In contrast, multi-agent system (MAS) simulators introduce detailed parameters but incur high computation costs per simulation, making them unsuitable for extracting effective measures. Therefore, we propose a framework that implements an MAS for constructing a training dataset, and then trains a support vector regression (SVR) model to obtain effective measure results. The proposed framework overcomes the weaknesses of conventional methods to produce effective control measure recommendations. The constructed SVR model was experimentally verified by comparing its performance on datasets with expected and unexpected outputs. Although datasets producing an unexpected output decreased the prediction accuracy, by removing randomness from the training dataset, the accuracy of the proposed method was still high in these cases. High-precision predictions of the MAS-based simulation output were obtained for both test datasets in under one second of the computational time. Furthermore, the experimental results establish that the proposed framework can obtain intuitively correct outputs for unknown inputs, and produces sufficiently high-precision prediction with lower computation costs than an existing method.

SIRVVD model-based verification of the effect of first and second doses of COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 vaccination in Japan.

As of August 2021, COVID-19 is still spreading in Japan. Vaccination, one of the key measures to bring COVID-19 under control, began in February 2021. Previous studies have reported that COVID-19 vaccination reduces the number of infections and mortality rates. However, simulations of spreading infection have suggested that vaccination in Japan is insufficient. Therefore, we developed a susceptible-infected-recovered-vaccination1-vaccination2-death model to verify the effect of the first and second vaccination doses on reducing the number of infected individuals in Japan; this includes an infection simulation. The results confirm that appropriate vaccination measures will sufficiently reduce the number of infected individuals and reduce the mortality rate.

Effectiveness of the COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application (COCOA) Based on Multi-Agent Simulation

As of Aug. 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is still spreading in the world. In Japan, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare developed “COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application (COCOA),” which was released on June 19, 2020. By utilizing COCOA, users can know whether or not they had contact with infected persons. If those who had contact with infected individuals keep staying at home, they may not infect those outside. However, effectiveness decreasing the number of infected individuals depending on the app’s various usage parameters is not clear. If it is clear, we could set the objective value of the app’s usage parameters (e.g., the usage rate of the total populations) and call for installation of the app. Therefore, we develop a multi-agent simulator that can express COVID-19 spreading and usage of the apps, such as COCOA. In this study, we describe the simulator and the effectiveness of the app in various scenarios. The result obtained in this study supports those of previously conducted studies.

SIR model-based verification of effect of COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application (COCOA) on reducing infectors in Japan.

As of April 2021, the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) continues to spread in Japan. To overcome COVID-19, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare of the Japanese government developed and released the COVID-19 Contact-Confirming Application (COCOA) on June 19, 2020. COCOA users can know whether they have come into contact with infectors. If persons who receive a contact notification through COCOA undertake self-quarantine, the number of infectors in Japan will decrease. However, the effectiveness of COCOA in reducing the number of infectors depends on the usage rate of COCOA, the rate of fulfillment of contact condition, the rate of undergoing the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) test, the false negative rate of the RT-PCR test, the rate of infection registration, and the self-quarantine rate. Therefore, we developed a Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR) model to estimate the effectiveness of COCOA. In this paper, we introduce the SIR model and report the simulation results for different scenarios that were assumed for Japan.