2021 CMS Winter Meeting

Ottawa, June 7 - 11, 2021

Public Lecture
Org: Caroline Colijn (Simon Fraser University)

CAROLINE COLIJN, Simon Fraser University Mathematics and the pandemic: from populations to individuals [PDF]: Mathematics has had a high-profile role in the COVID-19 pandemic, and even terms like "herd immunity" and "reproductive number" are household phrases. In this talk I will describe several mathematical models of COVID-19 transmission, and how they relate to data, first at the population scale, then at the scale of school transmission and finally at the person-to-person scale. At the population level, models are use for case forecasting; I'll outline our approach to this task and the challenges with forecasting at the present time. I will describe modelling heterogeneity in school transmission. Finally, I will outline new approaches to using virus RNA sequences to help us understand transmission dynamics at a high level of resolution.