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A mathematical framework for estimating risk of airborne
transmission of coronavirus
COVID-19 has posed severe challenges to public health responses across countries. Mitigation and containment tactics have largely relied on the initially held belief that COVID-19 is a respiratory infectious disease that relies on droplet transmission not airborne transmission.
The current study will model the aerosolised transmission of pathogens via turbulent expiratory events – coughing, sneezing and even exhaling. Many body hydrodynamics of a droplet cluster, mimicking a cough/sneeze will be simulated, to obtain a better understanding of droplet- airborne transmission of diseases. The role of polydispersity, hydrodynamic interactions, background turbulence, preferential concentration and droplet wake dynamics on the ‘cough cloud’’ will be studied.
Contact info:
anubhab@iitm.ac.in
The epidemiology and clinical information about COVID-19: A
study by IIT Bombay
The research group of Dr. Mandar M Inamdar from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay is working on the development of a general, cell-based model of 2D viral spread in a tissue in which cells are mechano-chemical entities that can deform, move, divide, and die. An additional layer of SARS-CoV-2 related kinetics will be provided for each cell that includes virus load per cell and the intensity of immune response. By modulating cell division rate, cellular motility diffusion rate of free virus, rate of cell-cell virus transfer, cell-lysis rate, and initial infection seeding, a landscape of infection patterns will be generated to understand the intensity of viral infection. Not surprisingly, the tissue-spread model is the in-host analog of infection spread in a population, where each cell within the tissue is the counterpart of an individual agent in an epidemiological model.
The long-term goal of this project is to extend the knowledge from this project to gain multi-level insights into the COVID-19 pandemic by studying the connection between in-host viral spread (immediate goal), population-level epidemiology, and the underlying molecular evolution.
Contact info:
minamdar@iitb.ac.in
The spatiotemporal estimation of the risk and the international
transmission of COVID-19: A domestic and global perspective
The study proposed to investigate three key aspects. First, spatial propagation is a key aspect behind the spread of COVID-19. Understanding the propagation mechanism is of paramount importance for preventive and corrective actions to be effective. It is proposed to combine the two critical components, namely temporal and spatial, into a single modelling framework of hierarchical models. While random effects models for such scenarios exist in literature, the study aims to extend them in two directions to facilitate the following: (a) allow to model nested nature of the data (such as districts within states); and (b) enable incorporation of covariates (for instance, climatic variables, mobility, economic factors, population size/density, biological variables). Second, the natural propagation of the epidemic is affected by implementations of (non-pharmaceutical) interventions. Successful implementation of such measures can favourably
VOL. IV ISSUE 10
VIGYAN PRASAR 19
COVID-19 SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EFFORTS IN INDIA