INSIDe
Public health crises, such as a pandemic, require decisive policy action. Governments can pursue a variety of non-pharmaceutical interventions of varying intrusiveness, ranging from voluntary social distancing of individuals to a mandatory shutdown of the country. These non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) do influence the spread of diseases and can avoid an overload of the healthcare system.
Population-based modeling of the spread of infections has proven indispensable for informing the decision-making process. Yet, the insights and forecasts provided by existing models are necessarily limited by their resolution and the data on which they rely on. Furthermore, the focusing on individual disease entities disregards indirect interactions and cross-immunities. To address these issues, the interdisciplinary project INSIDe (INtegrative modeling of the spread of Serious Infectious Diseases) will develop refined models and data integration strategies, to allow for the integrative spatio-temporal modeling of the spread of multiple diseases on multiple levels of resolution. In contrast to existing approaches, we will also employ spatially distributed wastewater sampling, which has been demonstrated to function as an early indicator for the rise of reported infections and hospitalizations.
The modular, open-source platform developed within INSIDe will allow for the integration of different models and modelling approaches for transmission and observation. This will facilitate the integration of different information, ranging from officially reported case numbers over wastewater sampling results all the way to data extracted from social media, and ultimately provide an improved understanding of the impact of testing strategies and NPIs.
Within the INSIDe consortium, the Institute of Software Technology will mainly work on the development of new models and the efficient implementation in the open source software framework MEmilio, which can be used to compute infection dynamics. The software will be highly scalable for appropriate supercomputers. The focus of INSIDe is the exchange of the mathematical-epidemiological infection models with the wastewater models developed in INSIDe.
The INSIDe project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Project runtime:
- 05/22 – 04/25
Scientific participants:
Further information: