Methodology for Modelling the new COVID-19 Pandemic Spread and Implementation to European Countries

TL;DR

This paper presents a new modeling methodology for COVID-19 spread in European countries, analyzing data, exploring correlations with country characteristics, and coupling with SIR models to inform future outbreak management.

Contribution

It introduces a parametrization model tailored for large populations and couples it with SIR-based models to better understand disease dynamics and reproductive numbers.

Findings

Identified correlations between country characteristics and model parameters.

Developed a coupled modeling approach with SIR models.

Provided insights useful for future COVID-19 recurrence scenarios.

Abstract

After the breakout of the disease caused by the new virus COVID-19, the mitigation stage has been reached in most of the countries in the world. During this stage, a more accurate data analysis of the daily reported cases and other parameters became possible for the European countries and has been performed in this work. Based on a proposed parametrization model appropriate for implementation to an epidemic in a large population, we focused on the disease spread and we studied the obtained curves, as well as, we investigated probable correlations between the country's characteristics and the parameters of the parametrization. We have also developed a methodology for coupling our model to the SIR-based models determining the basic and the effective reproductive number referring to the parameter space. The obtained results and conclusions could be useful in the case of a recurrence of this repulsive disease in the future.