# An agent-based model of COVID- 19 in the food industry for assessing public health and economic impacts of infection control strategies

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a model to simulate how different infection control strategies affect both public health and economic outcomes in the food industry during a pandemic.

## Contribution

The novel contribution is a customizable agent-based model that integrates public health and economic impacts of infection control strategies in food production.

## Key findings

- Temperature screening and virus testing protect public health but lead to significant economic costs.
- Vaccination is cost-effective but too slow for reactive use.
- Physical distancing and biosafety measures are cost-effective solutions.

## Abstract

The COVID- 19 pandemic exposed challenges of balancing public health and economic goals of infection control in essential industries like food production. To enhance decision-making during future outbreaks, we developed a customizable agent-based model (FInd CoV Control) that predicts and counterfactually compares COVID- 19 transmission in a food production operation under various interventions. The model tracks the number of infections as well as economic outcomes (e.g., number of unavailable workers, direct expenses, production losses). The results revealed strong tradeoffs between public health and economic impacts of interventions. Temperature screening and virus testing protect public health but have substantial economic downsides. Vaccination, while inexpensive, is too slow as a reactive strategy. Intensive physical distancing and biosafety interventions prove cost-effective. The variability and bimodality in predicted impacts of counterfactual interventions, explained by the chance effects and early stochastic infection die-off, caution against relying on single-operation real-world data for decision-making. These findings underscore the need for a proactive infrastructure capable of rapidly developing integrated infection-economic mechanistic models for the essential industries to guide infection control, policy-making, and socially acceptable decisions.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1038/s41598-025-97076-2.