Modifying Beta - CDCgov/DynODE GitHub Wiki

Unlike vaccination and external infectious individuals, modifying beta (transmission rate) does not always have to be in the form of a continuously differentiable function in the model. This model supports external beta coefficients to account for policy changes or other external factors that may influence transmission.

Beta coefficients can follow a continuous distribution, such as a sine wave to model seasonal variations, or they can be defined as a piecewise function to represent closures of businesses or other policy changes.

Users may specify points in time where the beta coefficient may suddenly change through the BETA_TIMES and BETA_COEFICIENTS parallel lists in the configuration scripts. At each time point specified in BETA_TIMES, the corresponding BETA_COEFICIENT is multiplied with beta up until the next BETA_TIME is reached.

Additionally, users have the flexibility to override the beta_coef() function within the Mechanistic Model itself to define their own continuous distribution for beta.

The key requirement is that the function must be compatible with jax just-in-time compilation.