Reopening Under Uncertainty: Stress-Testing California's COVID-19 Exit Strategy

Pedro Nascimento de Lima; Raffaele Vardavas; Lawrence Baker; Jeanne S Ringel; Robert J Lempert; Carolyn M Rutter; Jonathan Ozik

Reopening Under Uncertainty: Stress-Testing California's COVID-19 Exit Strategy

Rand Health Q. 2022 Jun 30;9(3):24. eCollection 2022 Jun.

Authors

Pedro Nascimento de Lima, Raffaele Vardavas, Lawrence Baker, Jeanne S Ringel, Robert J Lempert, Carolyn M Rutter, Jonathan Ozik

PMID: 35837515
PMCID: PMC9242558

Abstract

The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic required significant public health interventions from local governments. Early in the pandemic, RAND researchers developed a decision support tool to provide policymakers with insight into the trade-offs they might face when choosing among nonpharmaceutical intervention levels. Using an updated version of the model, the researchers performed a stress-test of a variety of alternative reopening plans, using California as an example. This article presents the general lessons learned from these experiments and discusses four characteristics of the best reopening strategies.

Keywords: California; Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19); Epidemiology; Modeling and Simulation; Pandemic; Public Health Preparedness; Robust Decision Making.