Author(s): Josée van den Hoogen; Stephen Okazawa  

DOI: 10.14339/STO-SAS-OCS-2021-MS-01-2     |     ISSN: TBD  

The Canadian Army’s largest and most complex training exercise is Exercise MAPLE RESOLVE which occurs annually in the spring. Several thousand soldiers from Canada and allied countries participate in the exercise ensuring high readiness to deploy on operational missions. In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant additional challenges on the exercise, particularly with the increasing prevalence of more-transmissible variants of the virus and the impending rollout of vaccines at the time of planning. In these circumstances, the potential magnitude of COVID-19's impact on the exercise was highly uncertain

Citation:

ABSTRACT

The Canadian Army’s largest and most complex training exercise is Exercise MAPLE RESOLVE which occurs annually in the spring. Several thousand soldiers from Canada and allied countries participate in the exercise ensuring high readiness to deploy on operational missions. In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic imposed significant additional challenges on the exercise, particularly with the increasing prevalence of more-transmissible variants of the virus and the impending rollout of vaccines at the time of planning. In these circumstances, the potential magnitude of COVID-19's impact on the exercise was highly uncertain. We present a stochastic model of COVID-19 transmission for military contexts based on the SusceptibleExposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) compartment approach that estimates the number of infections that may occur over time. The model implements several features of continued relevance to planning and risk mitigation strategies related to COVID-19 in military settings including: interactions between populations with different transmission dynamics, the risk associated with the prevalence of the virus in the local general population, dividing populations into cohorts to reduce transmission potential, multiple infection paths for different variants of the virus, the scheduling of vaccinations, and a dynamic model of vaccine efficacy from the time of the first dose. We show the results of the model applied to Exercise MAPLE RESOLVE 2021. This analysis quantified the potential scale of COVID-19 infections during the exercise and was used to support the Canadian Army’s decision to proceed with the exercise under strict adherence to a comprehensive COVID-19 risk mitigation strategy

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