Predicting the evolution of a pandemic

Phys.org  June 15, 2021 An international team of researchers (Kuwait, USA – NIST, Saudi Arabia) has developed a susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model (SEIR) with a vaccination compartment proposed to simulate theCOVID-19 spread in Saudi Arabia. The model considers seven stages of infection: susceptible (S), exposed (E), infectious (I), quarantined (Q), recovered (R), deaths (D), and vaccinated (V). As numerical models can be subject to various sources of uncertainties, they used the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) to constrain the model outputs and its parameters with available data. They conducted joint state-parameters estimation experiments assimilating daily data into the proposed model using the EnKF […]

When coronavirus is not alone: Team of complexity scientists present ‘meme’ model for multiple diseases

Phys.org  February 24, 2020 From ‘fake news’ to innovative technologies, many contagions spread as complex contagions via a process of social reinforcement, where multiple exposures are distinct from prolonged exposure to a single source. Contrarily, biological agents such as Ebola or measles are typically thought to spread as simple contagions. An international team of researchers (USA -University of Vermont, Northeastern University, Canada) demonstrates that these different spreading mechanisms can have indistinguishable population-level dynamics once multiple contagions interact. In the social context, their results highlight the challenge of identifying and quantifying spreading mechanisms, such as social reinforcement, in a world where […]