At an extraordinary meeting of the BGSMath Governing Council, to which Montserrat Alsina (in her role as a member of the platform Universities for Civil Rights) and the Catalan Society of Mathematics were invited, it was agreed to promote the mathematical contribution in the fight against the COVID-19 epidemic. Furthermore, the urgent need for predictive models of the number of infected individuals and hospital admissions was expressed, as well as, perhaps, the development of suggestions for logistical optimization in the management of emergency services.
For these reasons, the creation of five working groups on predictive epidemiological models has been promoted, either using existing models or creating new ad hoc ones, from different methodological approaches:
- Statistical models (Contact person: Pere Puig)
- Population dynamics models (Contact person: Lluís Alsedà)
- Territorial population dynamics models using PDEs (Contact person: Àngel Calsina)
- Complex networks (Contact person: Joan Saldanya)
- Artificial intelligence and neural network models
We call on the entire mathematical community to:
- Contribute to the work of any of the groups proposed above,
- Suggest new working methodologies for obtaining predictive models and eventually create the corresponding new working groups.
- Promote a new working group that can provide suggestions for logistical optimization in the management of emergency services.
All these initiatives (except for the management and coordination of the working groups) will be channeled through the account math4covid@crm.cat.
The website where information will be centralized is CovidWeb We encourage everyone to participate and spread the word.