Modelling the response of a public health department to infectious disease

We present a discrete-event simulation model of the response of a local public health department (LHD) to pertussis cases. We take a comprehensive view of public health actions, beginning with detection of an individual patient, confirmation of the case by physician and lab tests, and contact tracing and isolation of contacts by LHD personnel. We explicitly model the information transfer between providers, laboratories and LHDs, and examine the effect of different alerting strategies on the number of confirmed cases encountered. The effect of limited resource availability for contact tracing is also examined. Given our results, we suggest that resource availability has significant impact on the progression of a disease outbreak, as do information delays at various stages of the process.