An Agent-based model of COVID-19 Vaccine uptake in New York State

In the past we have explored how agent-based modeling can be used to study vaccine uptake and what is the mechanism underlying the diffusion of different vaccine opinions in hybrid spaces (e.g., physical, relational and cyber) can affect individuals’ vaccination decisions. But this prior work was limited to  just one small area. However, we know that urban and rural communities have different levels of digital connectivity and we were wondering if our initial findings are applicable to other counties which are more urban or to a larger study area. To explore this, at the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024)  we (Fuzhen Yin, Na Jiang, Lucie Laurian and myself) have a paper entitled "Agent-based Modeling of COVID-19 Vaccine uptake in New York State: Information Diffusion in Hybrid Spaces". 

This paper significantly extends our previous work in a number of ways. First we move from a single rural county to the entire state of New York which has 62 counties which differ substantially in  socioeconomic status. Furthermore, we move from a small population of 120,000 to over 20 million agents. By doing so, it allows us to compare vaccination uptakes in different areas (e.g., urban versus rural communities, second home destinations versus college towns). We also use  different parameters to initialize hybrid spaces for urban and rural populations to understand how individuals' preferences on hybrid spaces affect information diffusion and vaccination rates at a macro level. Lastly, we updated the decision-making rules for minors (i.e., ages under 18) that allows us to better simulate young population groups. In the sense that we make the assumption that minors need to have at least one of their guardians in the family network vaccinated already before they can take vaccines. By extending the model  we can can accurately simulate the vaccination rates for New York state (mean absolute error=6.93) and for the majority of counties within it (81%).

If this sounds of interest, below you can read the abstract of our paper, see our various hybrid spaces over the New York state along with our updated model logic and the aggregate results. The full reference and the link to the paper can be found at the bottom of the post. While the model itself, which was created in Mesa and the data needed to run the model can be found at: https://osf.io/3khyq/. We share our modeling scripts, input data and results at  for interested readers to reproduce or extend our work as they see fit but also to conform with the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable),

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, social media become an important hub for public discussions on vaccination. However, it is unclear how the rise of cyber space (i.e., social media) combined with traditional relational spaces (i.e., social circles), and physical space (i.e., spatial proximity) together affect the diffusion of vaccination opinions and produce different impacts on urban and rural population's vaccination uptake. This research builds an agent-based model utilizing the Mesa framework to simulate individuals' opinion dynamics towards COVID-19 vaccines, their vaccination uptake and the emergent vaccination rates at a macro level for New York State (NYS). By using a spatially explicit synthetic population, our model can accurately simulate the vaccination rates for NYS (mean absolute error=6.93) and for the majority of counties within it (81\%). This research contributes to the modeling literature by simulating individuals vaccination behaviors which are important for disease spread and transmission studies. Our study extends geo-simulations into hybrid-space settings (i.e., physical, relational, and cyber spaces).

Keywords: Agent-based modeling, GIS, Information diffusion, Hybrid spaces, Social networks, Health informatics, Vaccines, COVID-19. 

Schematic representation of hybrid spaces. Physical space includes family and group quarter network. Relational space represents people's social circles in work, school and daycare. Cyber space is a social media network. This figure only display 2% of total population in NYS (around 200,000 agents) for visualization process.

Modeling process and structure: from data to agent-behaviors.

Mapping the differences (i.e., mean absolute error (MAE)) in vaccination rate between simulated and ground truth data. 

Reference: 

Yin, F., Jiang, Na., Crooks, A.T., Laurian, L. (2024), Agent-based Modeling of Covid-19 Vaccine Uptake in New York State: Information Diffusion in Hybrid Spaces, Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Simulation (GeoSim 2024), Atlanta, GA., pp. 11-20. (pdf)