Modelling Covid-19 epidemic in Mexico, Finland and Iceland

• Main Authors: Barrio, Rafael A., Kaski, Kimmo K., Haraldsson, Gudmundur G., Aspelund, Thor, Govezensky, Tzipe
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: arXiv 2020
• Subjects: Physics and Society physics.soc-ph; Populations and Evolution q-bio.PE; FOS Physical sciences; FOS Biological sciences; Iceland
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2007.10806; https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.10806

Over the past two decades there has been a number of global outbreaks of viral diseases. This has accelerated the efforts to model and forecast the disease spreading, in order to find ways to confine the spreading regionally and between regions. Towards this we have devised a model of geographical spreading of viral infections due to human spatial mobility and adapted it to the latest COVID-19 pandemic. In this the region to be modelled is overlaid with a two-dimensional grid weighted with the population density defined cells, in each of which a compartmental SEIRS system of delay difference equations simulate the local dynamics (microdynamics) of the disease. The infections between cells are stochastic and allow for the geographical spreading of the virus over the two-dimensional space (macrodynamics). This approach allows to separate the parameters related to the biological aspects of the disease from the ones that represent the spatial contagious behaviour through different kinds of mobility of people acting as virus carriers. These provide sufficient information to trace the evolution of the pandemic in different situations. In particular we have applied this approach to three in many ways different countries, Mexico, Finland and Iceland and found that the model is capable of reproducing and predicting the stochastic global path of the pandemic. This study sheds light on how the diverse cultural and socioeconomic aspects of a country influence the evolution of the epidemics and also the efficacy of social distancing and other confinement measures.