Over the last 12 months, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland have been severely impacted by the spreading of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), commonly known as the coronavirus. I will present results from a recent modelling project that aims to contribute to the goal of an island with zero community transmissions and careful monitoring of routes of importation in the absence of effective pharmaceutical interventions.
In the proposed model, nodes correspond to locations or communities that are connected by links indicating travel and commuting between different locations. The mobility is inferred from empirical data and adjusted for restriction measures. The network comprises 3440 electoral divisions of the Republic of Ireland and 890 superoutput areas for Northern Ireland. The local dynamics within each node follows a phenomenological compartmental model including classes of susceptibles, infected, recovered, quarantined and deaths. Various scenarios will be considered including the 5-phase roadmap for Ireland, where the parameters are chosen to match the current number of reported deaths. In addition, I will discuss the effect of dynamic interventions that aim to keep the number of infected below a given threshold.
Reference:
Rory Humphries, Mary Spillane, Kieran Mulchrone, Sebastian Wieczorek, Micheal O’Riordain, Philipp Hövel: A metapopulation network model for the spreading of SARS-CoV-2: Case study for Ireland, Infectious Disease Modelling 6,420-437 (2021).