University of British Columbia
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed weaknesses in public health preparedness and response to infectious diseases. A major challenge has been real-time policy and resource planning: policy analysts have limited tools to explore policy options and their impact on the trajectory of the pandemic, with a lot of their work being based on exploring predefined scenarios. Moreover, the impact of policy options on socioeconomic factors usually is decoupled from the public health analysis leading to less ideal actions that might in turn impact mental and physical health in the population. In the case of COVID-19, for example, large-scale social distancing measures enacted in response to the current pandemic were effective at limiting the spread of SARS-CoV-2; however, these measures are unsustainable interventions for long periods of time, and have shown to affect the economy, education and the mental health of many members of society. With the number of COVID-19 cases falling, quantifying the impa