Modelling COVID-19 transmission in supermarkets using an agent-based model.

ABSTRACT: Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in early March 2020, supermarkets around the world have implemented different policies to reduce the virus transmission in stores to protect both customers and staff, such as restricting the maximum number of customers in a store, changes to the store layout, or enforcing a mandatory face covering policy. To quantitatively assess these mitigation methods, we formulate an agent-based model of customer movement in a supermarket (which we represent by a network) with a simple virus transmission model based on the amount of time a customer spends in close proximity to infectious customers (which we call the exposure time). We apply our model to synthetic store and shopping data to show how one can use our model to estimate exposure time and thereby the number of

SUBMITTER: Ying F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8034715 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature