Modeling the impact of essential workers in the context of social distancing for epidemic control

Guy Sella, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, Department of Biological Sciences, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Program for Mathematical Genomics

To explore how essential workers impact the effectiveness of pandemic control, and how their status affects their disease risk, we evaluated different models of essential worker interactions roughly corresponding to postal or delivery workers, grocery store workers, and healthcare workers, within the context of standard epidemiology models.