Coronavirus

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently generating considerable activity among applied and industrial mathematicians in all European nations.

A number of national task forces and ad-hoc research teams have for weeks been working to provide both the public and the various national authorities with accurate models of the evolution of the pandemic. Each effort adjusted to the local situation, and using data from regional hospitals to examine the effect of strategies and policies implemented at the national level.

This page on the Blog of the European Consortium aims to provide an overview of this spectrum of efforts, providing public web links, and some national contact points.

The page will be updated as more information comes in. ECMI salutes the effort to apply the most advanced mathematical insigts available throughout Europe to help in making the most informed decisions and ultimitaly alleviate this grave threat to populations everywhere.

If you would like to add some information about the situation in your country, please send it to the ECMI BLOG c/o

Germany

In Germany several groups are developing mathematical models and simulations for the spread of COVID-19. The ECMI centers in Kaiserslautern (Wolfgang Bock), Koblenz (Thomas Götz, goetz@uni-koblenz.de) and Trier (Jan-Pablo Burgard) joined the MOCOS-group (MOdeling COrona Spread) initiated at the ECMI-center Wroclaw (Tyll Krüger). The aim of this group is to perform microstructure simulations based on official census data involving household composition and age distribution as the main population structure variables. For both countries, Poland and Germany, as well as for two representative cities, Wroclaw and Berlin, we obtained first results indicating that a mitigation and herd immunity strategy is likely to fail. On the basis of a SIR microsimulation for Germany and Poland, we show that the interval for the transmission parameter, for which the COVID-19 epidemic stays overcritical but below the capacity limit of the health care system to reach herd immunity is so narrow that a successful implementation of this strategy is likely to fail.
These finding are avilable in the preprint „Mitigation and herd immunity strategy for COVID-19 is likely to fail“, see https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.25.20043109v1
Currently we are including effects of quarantine measures, contact tracing and how social distancing may be allowed to vary over time in the model.
Stay tuned for more results coming up soon …

Thomas Götz