Existing COVID-19 Models and Groups
Due the impact that the coronavirus crisis has had on the world, many researchers from diverse fields have contributed to the global research effort. As a consequence of this, it can be hard for people outside of academia to know the best places to seek information. There are, of course, national and international agencies such as the World Health Organization and the various national public health agencies dedicated to collating and communicating the science to policymakers. But there are also a number of dedicated teams that are tackling the pandemic.
To better showcase these individuals and the models that have come out of these efforts, we have put together a list of 34 COVID-19 Models and Research Groups. We have also elected to highlight below two research groups that have contributed significantly to the global understanding of this disease. These groups offer greater insight into the immense work that go into modelling and, ultimately, fighting an emerging public health threat.
Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
The Imperial College team has produced multiple models for making predictions around several problems faced throughout the pandemic. In Report 9, they present their only Agent-based model and use it to predict the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on a population level in Great Britain and the US. For more specific problems, they tend to use mathematical models. Rather than standard compartmental models, these tend to be specific models tailored to each problem, examples include Reports 16 and 19.
They also use a lot of statistical modelling and machine learning to study existing data. In fact, statistical models seem to have become the focus of their work as the pandemic has progressed and data has become more available. In Reports 13, 20, 21 and 23, they use a “semi-mechanistic Bayesian machine learning model”. This is their favoured model for tracking epidemics as they progress by estimating transmission intensity and attack rates conditional on the reported number of deaths.
The University of Washington, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)
This institute was well established before the pandemic but they have contributed several publications to support policymaking around COVID-19. Although most of their work is statistical (as has been common in the broader field of work), two papers (below) discuss simulation modelling.
The model comparison paper looks at several popular models that were used to predict the evolution of the epidemic. All of the models that are compared are mathematical or statistical but the research groups used are worth looking into if you are looking to find more high-quality research groups.
The forecasting publication uses an agent-based model to predict hospital demand in the United States and in countries within the European Economic Area. It may be enlightening to compare this to Report 27 from the Imperial College team to see how similar problems are studied using different methods.