SEI has unveiled a new open-source and freely-available macroeconomic model designed to help national and regional agencies incorporate the economic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic into their planning.

The model allows planners to consider potential measures that can be put into effect to limit the spread of Covid-19, such as lockdowns and social distancing, and simulates the implications of a wide range of possible future scenarios. For example, planners can consider the impact of the global economic slowdown on tourism, or on demand for their country’s exports. It calculates over a short-run period (3-5 years) and can be used for generating near-term population and value added projections for input into SEI's energy and water resource planning tools: LEAP and WEAP.

The model can simulate waning immunity, reinfections, and multiple concurrent disease variants. The first release simulates a baseline variant resembling the Alpha variant that emerged early on and the later Delta variant. It can be readily modified to include new, emerging variants, such as the recent Omicron variant, as more data describing its epidemiological characteristics become available.