Covid-19 projection models
predicting case counts with or without public health interventions in BC.
In the summer of 2021, I took part in the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) Covid-19 Student Case Study Competition. In this competitioon, the goal of the competition was to take any Covid-19 data publicly available and develop an analysis tool or develop a model that could be used to influence policy making relevant to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our team was comprised of myself, Travis Blimkie, and Hossam Mohammad. We were mentored by Dr. Daniel McDonald (UBC Statistics Professor).
Here we wanted to explore the impact of public health interventions (i.e., mask mandates, banning of private gatherings) on case counts in British Columbia, Canada. We used a SEIR (Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered) epidemiological compartmental model. Code is available at our Github repository and the poster we presented is below.
In short, we found that if two interventions implemented on Nov 7th, 2020 (no private gatherings) and Nov 19th, 2020 (masks mandated in all stores and non-essential travel discouraged) were implemented two weeks earlier, there could have been an estimated 2-fold fewer cases by Dec 15, 2020.
We were awarded first place in the case competition!
