RAPID/Collaborative Research: Developing Pandemics and Healing Models for Coronavirus COVID-19 to Assist in Policy Making

The current pandemic has stimulated a strong response on the part of local, state, and federal government, with containment largely achieved through stringent lockdowns, effectively quarantining nearly every household in the country. Given the enormous socio-economic impacts of this approach, it is imperative to understand how to minimize the spread of the epidemic while also minimizing deleterious effects and maximizing the availability of critical health resources. This project seeks to address this challenge by devising a better and scalable alternative to lockdown under suitable constraints.

This project focuses on developing models for the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular looking at neighboring community spread, mitigation measures, and optimal distribution of healthcare resources in that context. This project aims to (i) devise a better and scalable alternative to full lockdown; (ii) devise a cognitive solution that can be applied to various demographics having heterogeneous connectivity and population distribution with minimal information regarding previous epidemic spread; and (iii) minimize the impact of epidemic model uncertainties on the confinement and medical resource allocation strategies. The PIs will employ a collection of novel mathematical techniques to the problem that can handle heterogeneity and are scalable. The interdisciplinary team includes Johns Hopkins University, which has been a major Center for the collection of COVID-19 data.

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.