Affiliation:
1. Predictive Science Inc., San Diego, CA 92121, USA
2. Leidos Inc., Tysons, VA 22182, USA
3. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Reachback, Fort Belvoir, VA 22060-6201, USA
4. Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Imperial College, London, SW7 2BX, UK
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Introduction
The CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a formidable threat to populations around the world. The U.S. Military, in particular, represents a unique and distinguishable subset of the population, primarily due to the age and gender of active duty personnel. Current investigations have focused on health outcome forecasts for civilian populations, making them of limited value for military planning.
Materials and Methods
We have developed and applied an age-structured susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered, or dead compartmental model for both civilian and military populations, driven by estimates of the time-dependent reproduction number, R(t), which can be both fit to available data and also forecast future cases, intensive care unit (ICU) patients, and deaths.
Results
We show that the expected health outcomes for active duty military populations are substantially different than for civilian populations of the same size. Specifically, while the number of cases is not expected to differ dramatically, severity, both in terms of ICU burdens and deaths, is substantially lower.
Conclusions
Our results confirm that the burden placed on military health centers will be substantially lower than that for equivalent-sized civilian populations. More practically, the tool we have developed to investigate this (https://q.predsci.com/covid19/) can be used by military health planners to estimate the resources needed in particular locations based on current estimates of the transmission profiles of COVID-19 within the surrounding civilian population in which the military installation is embedded. As this tool continues to be developed, it can be used to assess the likely impact of different intervention strategies, as well as vaccine policies; both for the current pandemic as well as future ones.
Funder
National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response Research program
Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Reachback
Leidos
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,General Medicine
Cited by
3 articles.
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