Mathematics of a COVID Pandemic or How to Throw Stones at the Infection Curve

The role of mathematicians in helping to understand the dynamics of the 2020 pandemic and to offer useful insights seems by now hard to deny. In that spirit, I will present some recent work that myself and colleagues have done on the COVID topic at The Ohio State. In particular, I will attempt to illustrate basic concepts of the so-called dynamic survival analysis (DSA) and their practical applications to modeling and predicting regional COVID epidemic curves. The key mathematical ingredients of DSA are the so called stone throwing construction and the survival interpretation of the network SIR equations. During earlier stages of the pandemic in the US (perhaps to up until mid April) the DSA-based methods were reasonably successful in making predictions about daily counts of infections and were used in fact by several midwestern states to help guide the allocation of their hospital resources.

Hangouts Meet: at 15.45

meet.google.com/dsb-xjix-oxj