After some spreadsheet basics, Usha led us through a meeting in which worked in groups to think about modeling some aspect of the COVID19 outbreak.
For the COVID19 virus, pose 3 specific quantitative questions, the answers to which would be useful in your role as health commissioner. Try to consider questions that can be dealt with mathematically.
Here are our questions:
- How do we do social distancing? Room needed as we move forward? How might masks enable that distance to change? Considering cases of classrooms? How much room is needed?
- Connecting to airline space/seats?
- Sources of data? What are they? Cases, test, deaths? How accurate or inaccurate are they? How does that affect trends?
- How does model change … what does it look like when its over?
- When will it be over????? What will it look like for us to consider it over?
- How does infection rate for first 15 days in NYC compare to Sioux Falls, South Dakota?
- Importance of percents? Comparing per capital.
- Pregnant women – what percent are testing positive and what percent of newborns are testing positive?
- If average person infects 2 people vs 1 person. What do those graphs look like?
- Age correlation question
- R0 What is it? How many others does 1 person infect?
- How might age percentages change?
Then Usha walked us through a modeling process.
Usha emphasized that it is important to simplify the situation when modeling. The real world phenomenon of virus transmission is complicated and dynamic, with countless variables. We need to choose a few variables and build a model from that. We can make changes to the model after we build it.
Usha gave us the following list of resources to work from in our small groups: https://padlet.com/mathstrands/MathJourneys
We then went into breakout groups to work on individual questions. These are the spreadsheets we developed (all in draft):
- What was the NYC data for cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for the first 10 days in April?
- How does infection rate for first 15 days in NYC compare to Sioux Falls, South Dakota?
- How does social distancing affect the rate of spread?
- How can we model cases, hospitalizations, and deaths from a R0 rate, a hospitalization rate, and a death rate?
Other resources for modeling (and understanding) the Coronavirus outbreak:
- What 5 Coronavirus Models Say the Next Month Will Look Like (April 22, 2020)
- Any of Tomas Pueyo’s articles
This NCTM webinar:
