Public health policy
Infectious disease prediction and control
How can we apply the principles of design and decision making to help bring the pandemic under control?
To answer this question, I modeled how an infectious disease spreads in a small population. Diseases such as COVID-19 spread through social interaction. I programmed intelligent agents to model a complex social system.
Optimization can be used to determine the critical amount of intervention necessary to keep the disease in check.
I used StoMADS, a derivative free stochastic optimization algorithm to reduce the number of hospitalizations beneath the healthcare capacity while reducing the socio-economic cost of interventions by up to 5 times compared to a complete lock-down. The effect of the optimal health policies on the trajectory of the disease is shown below.
