Covid-19 Disease Simulation using GAMA platform

Abstract

In less than three months after its emergence in China, the Covid-19 pandemic has spread to at least 180 countries. In the absence of previous experience with this new disease, public health authorities have implemented many experiments in a short period and, in a mostly uninformed way, various combinations of interventions at different scales. These include a ban on large gatherings, closure of borders— individual and collective containment, monitoring of population movements, social tracing, social distancing, etc. However, as the pandemic is progressing, data are collected from various sources. On the one hand, authorities allow to make informed adjustments to the current and planned interventions and reveal them. On the other hand, an urgent need for tools and methodologies that enable fast analysis, understanding, comparison, and forecasting of the effectiveness of the responses against COVID-19 across different communities and contexts. In this perspective, computational modeling appears as invaluable leverage as it allows us to explore in silico a range of intervention strategies before the potential phase of field implementation.