In the three years since SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in China, hundreds of millions of people have been infected and millions have died. Along with the immediate need for treatment solutions, the COVID-19 epidemic has reinforced the need for mathematical models that can predict the spread of the pandemic in an ever-changing environment. The susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) model has been widely used to model COVID-19 transmission, however, with limited success.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMathematical and statistical models have played an important role in the analysis of data from COVID-19. They are important for tracking the progress of the pandemic, for understanding its spread in the population, and perhaps most significantly for forecasting the future course of the pandemic and evaluating potential policy options. This article describes the types of models that were used by research teams in Israel, presents their assumptions and basic elements, and illustrates how they were used, and how they influenced decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBy the end of 2020, a year since the first cases of infection by the Covid-19 virus have been reported; several pharmaceutical companies made significant progress in developing effective vaccines against the Covid-19 virus that has claimed the lives of more than 10^{6} people over the world. On the other hand, there is growing evidence of re-infection by the virus, which can cause further outbreaks. In this paper, we apply statistical physics tools to examine theoretically the vaccination rate required to control the pandemic for three different vaccine efficiency scenarios and five different vaccination rates.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Fluids (1994)
August 2020
By the end of July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had infected more than 17 × 10 people and had spread to almost all countries worldwide. In response, many countries all over the world have used different methods to reduce the infection rate, such as case isolation, closure of schools and universities, banning public events, and forcing social distancing, including local and national lockdowns. In our work, we use a Monte Carlo based algorithm to predict the virus infection rate for different population densities using the most recent epidemic data.
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