RAPID: Analysis of Multiscale Network Models for the Spread of COVID-19

Mathematical and Physical Sciences - The current pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has upended the daily lives of more than a billion people worldwide, and governments are struggling with the task of responding to the spread of the disease. Uncertainty in transmission rates and the outcomes of social distancing, "shelter-at-home" executive orders, and other interventions have created unprecedented challenges to the United States health care system. This project will address these issues directly using advanced mathematical modeling from dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and networks. The mathematical models, which are formulated with the specific features of COVID-19 in mind, will provide insights that are critical to people on the front lines who need to make recommendations for intervention strategies and human-behavior patterns to best mitigate the spread of this disease in a timely manner. The project will train a postdoctoral scholar, a PhD student, and two undergraduate students in the research needed to solve these complex problems.

The standard approach for epidemic modeling, at the community scale and larger, is compartmental models in which individuals are in one of a small number of states (for example, susceptible, infected, recovered, exposed, latent), with individuals moving between states. The COVID-19 epidemic can be modeled in this way, with resistance as part of the dynamics. The simplest examples of such models for large populations are coupled ordinary differential equations that describe the fraction of a population in each of the states. To model the stochasticity of infection and latency, models with self-exciting point processes can be fit to real-world data. This project compares the dynamical systems and stochastic models of relevance to COVID-19 transmission. The models also incorporate network structure for the transmission pathways. The project extends prior research on contagions on multilayer networks by incorporating multiple transmission methods and coupling between the spread of the contagion itself and human behavior patterns. The project leverages high-resolution societal mixing patterns in epidemics, as they influence both (1) observations and demographics of who has been diagnosed with COVID-19 and (2) who transits the disease, sometimes without being diagnosed.


This award is co-funded with the Applied Mathematics program and the Computational Mathematics program (Division of Mathematical Sciences), and the Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.