COVID-19: On the Disparity in Outcomes Between Military and Civilian Populations

Abstract

The CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic remains a formidable threat to populations around the world. The U.S. Military, in particular, represents a unique and distinguishable subset of the population, primarily due to the age and gender of active duty personnel. Current investigations have focused on health outcome forecasts for civilian populations, making them of limited value for military planning. We have developed and applied an age-structured susceptible, exposed, infectious, recovered, or dead compartmental model for both civilian and military populations, driven by estimates of the time-dependent reproduction number, R(t), which can be both fit to available data and also forecast future cases, intensive care unit (ICU) patients, and deaths. We show that the expected health outcomes for active duty military populations are substantially different than for civilian populations of the same size. Specifically, while the number of cases is not expected to differ dramatically, severity, both in terms of ICU burdens and deaths, is substantially lower. Our results confirm that the burden placed on military health centers will be substantially lower than that for equivalent-sized civilian populations. More practically, the tool we have developed to investigate this (https://q.predsci.com/covid19/) can be used by military health planners to estimate the resources needed in particular locations based on current estimates of the transmission profiles of COVID-19 within the surrounding civilian population in which the military installation is embedded. As this tool continues to be developed, it can be used to assess the likely impact of different intervention strategies, as well as vaccine policies; both for the current pandemic as well as future ones.