Data-Driven Estimation of Effectiveness of COVID-19 Non-pharmaceutical Intervention Policies

  • Yash Mahajan
  • , Sheikh Rabiul Islam
  • , Mohammad Ruhul Amin
  • , Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs), such as Stay-at-Home, and Face-Mask-Mandate, are essential components of the public health response to contain an outbreak like COVID-19. However, it is very challenging to quantify the individual or joint effectiveness of NPIs and their impact on people from different racial and ethnic groups or communities in general. Therefore, in this paper, we study the following two research questions: 1) How can we quantitatively estimate the effectiveness of different NPI policies pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic?; and 2) Do these policies have considerably different effects on communities from different races and ethnicity? To answer these questions, we model the impact of an NPI as a joint function of stringency and effectiveness over a duration of time. Consequently, we propose a novel stringency function that can provide an estimate of how strictly an NPI was implemented on a particular day. Next, we applied two popular tree-based discriminative classifiers, considering the change in daily COVID cases and death counts as binary target variables, while using stringency values of different policies as independent features. Finally, we interpreted the learned feature weights as the effectiveness of COVID-19 NPIs. Our experimental results suggest that, at the country level, restaurant closures and stay-at-home policies were most effective in restricting the COVID-19 confirmed cases and death cases respectively; and overall, restaurant closing was most effective in hold-down of COVID-19 cases at individual community levels such as Asian, White, Black, AIAN and, NHPI. Additionally, we also performed a comparative analysis between race-specific effectiveness and country-level effectiveness to see whether different communities were impacted differently. Our findings suggest that the different policies impacted communities (race and ethnicity) differently.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2022
EditorsShusaku Tsumoto, Yukio Ohsawa, Lei Chen, Dirk Van den Poel, Xiaohua Hu, Yoichi Motomura, Takuya Takagi, Lingfei Wu, Ying Xie, Akihiro Abe, Vijay Raghavan
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages5312-5321
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781665480451
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2022 - Osaka, Japan
Duration: Dec 17 2022Dec 20 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2022

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Big Data 2022
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityOsaka
Period12/17/2212/20/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Information Systems and Management
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Control and Optimization

Keywords

  • COVID-19
  • Communities
  • Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs)
  • Policy Stringency

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