Variety Dynamics is a powerful tool to help design the early stage interventions to control epidemics and reduce their scope, scale, costs and adverse consequences on populations and countries.
The early stages of epidemics are characterised by lack of information, positive feedback loops and the resulting need to act as early as possible.
Practically, positive feedback loops in epidemics occur in many ways. At heart is that the more people are infected, the more people become infected.
Typically, to date, government decision making has been based primarily on the output of Discrete Event Simulation software (DES). This models the epidemic in terms of changes to the state at discrete event points in the epidemic (e.g. infection, visiting doctor, pathological testing, hospital triage, bed in ICU, treatment, review, recovery, death...). DES has been preferentially used due to familiarity - hospitals use it in normal life for planning.
DES has two limitations. First, DES does not identify the positive feedback loops needed to be addressed. It is a linear model. Second, DES takes time, a long time, to gather the information to make its model. In fact, ideally, the epidemic has to reach a stable state before a DES model has the information to make the simulation model. Together, these mean that government's responses to epidemics are to late to be effective at early control.
Systems Dynamics (SD) modelling identifies positive feedback loops almost immediately via its preparatory stage of creating a causal loop diagram. Also, besides being so much faster, SD modelling requires much less information than DES. SD can provide some of the same data as DES for health purposes, e.g. . flows of patients through the system. However, SD although faster than DES still does not explicitly provide strategies to manage the epidemic.
Variety Dynamics analysis provides a means to identify strategies, operations and tactics likely to be effective in the early stages of an epidemic, and also, if necessary at later stages. Epidemics dynamically change the distribution of variety. If nothing is done in response, or if the response is delayed, then power and control of the society/state flows towards the epidemic and its cause, and away from the government, people and existing institutions.
Variety dynamics can be used to quickly map the distribution and dynamics of distribution of new variety caused by the epidemic. This then offers those intervening with a ready understanding of the scale and diversity of variety changes needed to address the epidemic. Variety Dynamics works symbiotically with System Dynamics modelling. However, DES modelling, by its nature, is too slow in its response to be useful.