Prediction of the Impact of the End of year Festivities on the Local Epidemiology of COVID-19 Using Agent-Based Simulation with Hidden Markov Models

Abstract

Towards the end of 2020, as people changed their usual behavior due to end of year festivities, increasing the frequency of meetings and the number of people who attended them, the COVID-19 local epidemic’s dynamic changed. Since the beginnings of this pandemic, we have been developing, calibrating and validating a local agent-based model (AbcSim) that can predict intensive care unit and deaths’ evolution from data contained in the state electronic medical records and sociological, climatic, health and geographic information from public sources. In addition, daily symptomatic and asymptomatic cases and other epidemiological variables of interest disaggregated by age group can be forecast. Through a set of Hidden Markov Models, AbcSim reproduces the transmission of the virus associated with the movements and activities of people in this city, considering the behavioral changes typical of local holidays. The calibration and validation were performed based on official data from La Rioja city in Argentina. With the results obtained, it was possible to demonstrate the usefulness of these models to predict possible outbreaks, so that decision-makers can implement the necessary policies to avoid the collapse of the health system.