by Chris McLean & Peter Bruce

Never before have statistical models received the attention they are getting now in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic.  It is hard to read a news feed today without encountering either:

• New predictions…

The work of an Italian mathematician in the 1930s may hold the key to epidemic modeling.

That's because models that try to replicate reality in all its detail have proven hard to steer during this crisis, leading to poor predictions despite noble and urgent efforts to recalibrate them. On the other hand overly stylized compartmental models have run headlong into paradoxes such as Sweden's herd immunity.…

This is the second of two articles about our recent participation in the Pandemic Response Hackathon. Our project (CoronaRank) was one of only 5 projects out of 230 submissions chosen as Spotlight Winners to present at the closing ceremony. Read on for the technical aspects of our solution, for a more general overview of the hackathon and our product see our first article…

Here are some (very) early outputs from an Agent-Based Model of COVID-19 that I'm currently developing.

It allows configuring a number of parameters including:

• population sizes (of healthy and infected people) by age
• distribution of vulnerability by age
• level of social distancing in effect by…