Modelling, predicting, and fighting covid-19

Details

Supervisors

Jungers, Raphaël M.

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil en mathématiques appliquées, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

The Covid-19 has hit our lives and impacted all of us over the last few years. In an attempt to bring the pandemic under control and to understand it better, some mathematicians to have modelled epidemiological propagation. In that sense, a consensus of Flemish universities created a very complex model, SIMID. In another way, two professors at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve developed a much simpler model. These two models were used as a reference in Belgium during this crisis. The objective of this MSc thesis is twofold: analyse these two models from the perspectives of modelling complexity and accuracy, and make a proposal for a new model. These three models were used based on the same set of 2020 data in Belgium. This work emphasized the need to consider the trade-off between modelling complexity and accuracy. It also showed possible differences between the propagation factor R0 depending on the models used, but the usefulness of its trend in support to decision-making regarding the manage- ment of possible confinement measures.