COVID-19: Fast multi-shot epidemic interventions for post lockdown Covid-19 mitigation: Open-loop mitigation strategies
Lead Research Organisation:
Imperial College London
Department Name: Design Engineering (Dyson School)
Abstract
The objective of this 4-month SPRINT is to design and validate new exit-strategies from the current lockdown policy that actively suppress COVID-19, while allowing significant economic activity. Currently proposed exit-strategies suggest that intermittent lockdowns, in addition to contact tracing, masking, and other measures, may be necessary until an effective vaccine is found. Most of the these propose using data-driven feedback signals, such as hospital admissions, to initiate lockdowns, with a key design consideration being the capacity of the healthcare system. The difficulty with this approach is timing. Intervene too early, and one simply shifts the peak of ill people to a later date, whereas too late an intervention will not limit the peak of infections. The issue of timing is exacerbated by the virus having up to a 14-day incubation period and an initial exponential growth rate. Thus, the problem of observing the true state of the epidemic, in the face of exponential growth, makes the effectiveness of any data-driven feedback policy extremely sensitive to the timing of intervention. From a classical perspective, controlling locally unstable systems, as this is, with time-varying time-delays, is known to be a frontier problem in control engineering. Our suggestion is to circumvent this difficulty by developing periodic open-loop lockdown strategies over short timescales. Such policies, will help suppressing the virus and allow predictable periodic periods of lockdown, thereby facilitating economic activity. The policies will be validated on advanced, realistic epidemiological mathematical models and data, and will be developed for national and international compartmental scenarios.
Organisations
Publications
Bin M
(2021)
Hysteresis-based supervisory control with application to non-pharmaceutical containment of COVID-19.
in Annual reviews in control
Bin M
(2021)
Post-lockdown abatement of COVID-19 by fast periodic switching.
in PLoS computational biology
Dudkina E
(2023)
A comparison of centrality measures and their role in controlling the spread in epidemic networks
in International Journal of Control
Katsikouli P
(2020)
Distributed Ledger Enabled Control of Tyre Induced Particulate Matter in Smart Cities
in Frontiers in Sustainable Cities
Yilmaz S
(2020)
Kemeny-based testing for COVID-19.
in PloS one
Description | Two approached were investigated. 1. The design of fast switching policies as a means of non-pharmaceutical interventions to mitigate Covid 19. 2. New testing and vaccination strategies. |
Exploitation Route | The results can be directly applied to manage Covid-19. |
Sectors | Healthcare Government Democracy and Justice |
URL | http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~rod/covid/default.htm |
Description | The results of the award were communicated to the Irish and Scottish governments through the respective modelling groups. We have also interacted closely with the independent Zero-Covid group in Ireland. Ideas were also communicated informally to other international policy makers. The work was also reported in the wider scientific community; in particular, in Australia; Italy and to the wider control community. Opinion pieces on the work can be found in: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2020-12-08/targeted-covid-lockdowns-could-help-during-wait-for-vaccines https://www.scientificamerican.com/author/lewi-stone/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-020-01115-w |
First Year Of Impact | 2020 |
Sector | Healthcare,Government, Democracy and Justice |
Impact Types | Societal Economic Policy & public services |