Essential Workers at Risk: An Agent-Based Model (SAFE-ABM) with Uncertainty Quantification

Essential workers face elevated infection risks due to their critical roles during pandemics, and protecting them remains a significant challenge for public health planning. This study develops SAFE-ABM, a simulation-based framework using Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), to evaluate targeted intervention strategies, explicitly capturing structured interactions across families, workplaces, and schools. We simulate key scenarios such as unrestricted movement, school closures, mobility restrictions specific to essential workers, and workforce rotation with and without quarantine, to assess their impact on disease transmission dynamics. To ensure robust uncertainty assessment, we integrate a novel Bayesian Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) framework, systematically capturing variability in transmission rates, recovery times, and mortality estimates. Our comparative analysis demonstrates that workforce rotation substantially reduces transmission among essential workers, even without quarantine, while workforce rotation combined with quarantine enforcement provides additional reduction in cumulative deaths and infection burden. Unlike less targeted interventions, the rotational workforce strategies preserve a larger portion of the susceptible population, resulting in a more controlled and sustainable epidemic trajectory. These findings offer critical insights for optimizing intervention strategies that mitigate disease spread while maintaining essential societal functions.