Understanding the COVID-19 Pandemic: Math, Models, Mobility, and Taking a Nation's Temperature

Dirk Brockmann, professor at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University of Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute, offers insights into his work to understand the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes applying computational models to predict the global dissemination of the virus during the pandemic's early phase; discovering universal subexponential growth regimes in the first epidemic wave in China and other countries and a theoretical model that accounts for systematic behavioral changes; and developing a nationwide high-resolution monitor in Germany that quantifies how much and in what way mobility was affected during lockdown periods. Brockmann, a former Northwestern Engineering professor, discusses how data on resting heart rate, physical activity, and sleep data collected through smartwatches of 500,000 participants led to the design of a national fever thermometer to predict the time course of confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Germany.