With the sirplus package you can also set up experiments. For example, let's say that one week after the beginning of the epidemic, schools and non-essential businesses are closed to encourage social distancing. We can model the impacts that policies may have and compare to our baseline model. In this example, we model a policy-based increase in social distancing by ramping down the act.rate.e (# of exposure events, or acts, between individuals in the E and S compartment, per day) after 7 days and plot this model next to our baseline.
With the sirplus package you can also set up experiments. We will set up two
- Experiment #1: One week after the beginning of the epidemic, schools and non-essential businesses are closed to encourage social distancing. This causes the act.rate to gradually drop from 10 to 6 over the course of the next week. In this experiment, we imagine these policies are never lifted, so act.rate remains at 6 for the duration of the simulation.
- Experiment #2: Again, one week after the beginning of the epidemic, social distancing policies are put into place resulting in act.rate dropping from 10 to 6 over the next week. But after two weeks these policies are lifted and the act.rate returns to normal within the next week.