Reopening California: Seeking robust, non-dominated COVID-19 exit strategies.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic required significant public health interventions from local governments. Although nonpharmaceutical interventions often were implemented as decision rules, few studies evaluated the robustness of those reopening plans under a wide range of uncertainties. This paper uses the Robust Decision Making approach to stress-test 78 alternative reopening strategies, using California as an example. This study uniquely considers a wide range of uncertainties and demonstrates that seemingly sensible reopening plans can lead to both unnecessary COVID-19 deaths and days of interventions. We find that plans using fixed COVID-19 case thresholds might be less effective than strategies with time-varying reopening thresholds. While we use California as an example, our results are particu

SUBMITTER: Nascimento de Lima P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8547648 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature