User-oriented Extension and Automation of Agent-based Software for Pathogen-specific Modelling of Epidemics (EPIPREDICT)

Basic data for this project

Description

ue to our globalized and ever-more connected world, infectious diseases spread wider and faster than ever before. Especially in wake of the 2020 Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, it becomes clear that such diseases can rise from very few cases to a global thread within days. While there are numerous epidemiological prediction models, most of them follow a macroscopic approach to approximate overall infections or case fatalities. However, a more profound understanding of how the spread is impacted by biological (age, sex, immunization, …) , social (relationships, working hours, individual response to infection, …) and public/political factors (public fear, infection prevention policies, …) can help to craft more sophisticated epidemics response mechanisms. To this end microsimulations are used to get a deeper understanding of drivers of the epidemic, to predict possible future states and to enhance decision making. As of March 1st, a new cross-sectional project, EPIPREDICT, funded by the Nationale Forschungsplattform für Zoonosen was initiated. This project aims at extending the modeling platform to enable the analysis of various zoonotic disease infection scenarios. These diseases originate from non-human animals and are in many cases extremely dangerous to humans as our immune system is generally not sufficiently prepared to respond to disease exposue. Bird-Flu, Swine-Flu, HIV, Ebola, Malaria, Hanta-Virus and the recent Sars-Cov-2 belong to this family of diseases. However, the individual dynamic of such diseases and the consequential model complexity varies significantly.