Mathematical and computational initiatives from the University of Buenos Aires to contribute to decision-making in the context of COVID-19 in Argentina

ARRAR, MEHRNOOSH; BELLOLI, LAOUEN MAYAL LOUAN; BIANCO, ANA MARIA; BOECHI, LEONARDO; CASTRO, RODRIGO DANIEL; DURAN, GUILLERMO ALFREDO; ETCHENIQUE, ROBERTO ARGENTINO; GOLDSMIT, RODRIGO; MINOLDO, SOL; QUIROGA, RODRIGO; SOLOVEY, GUILLERMO; VALDORA, MARINA; ZAPATERO,MARIANO

Science Reviews From the End of the World

Centro de Estudios sobre Ciencia, Desarrollo y Educación Superior

Año: 2021 vol. 2 p. 7 - 41

2683-9288

The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has caused over one million deathsworldwide during 2020 (World Health Organization, n.d.). Thousands of academic groups around the world have beenworking on issues related to the pandemic since the beginning of 2020; the group of Neil Ferguson at Imperial CollegeLondon being of the most cited (?Report 1 - Estimating the Potential Total Number of Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)Cases in Wuhan City, China? n.d.)) along with the Franco-Spanish engineer Tomás Pueyo, with his renowned anecdote ofthe hammer and dance as key tools to face COVID-19 (Pueyo 2020).Due to the great difficulty that health organizations have faced in finding effective treatments and vaccines, and thuscontaining the progression of the pandemic, new approaches have emerged that seek to use information (previouslyexisting or generated during the pandemic) to help the decision-making process of institutional stakeholders. These aremultidisciplinary approaches that consider logistical, economic, political and social aspects.From the applied math and computer science institutes -Instituto de Cálculo (IC) and the Instituto de Ciencias de laComputación (ICC)- of the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (FCEyN-UBA)and CONICET, a multidisciplinary group with extensive experience in the development and research of mathematicalcomputational tools, who, alongside scientists from other national academic institutions, established collaborations withdifferent jurisdictions, predominantly in the Province of Buenos Aires, in order to facilitate decision-making during thepandemic.In this article we summarize the main activities carried out by this scientific nucleus. It is a broad set of contributions,ranging from data analysis and recommendations to different districts, to rapid response projects in territory. Thesedevelopments enable the acquisition of data and organization of available resources; quantify and predict the progress ofthe pandemic; and facilitate the quantitative analysis of scenarios to predict the effects of certain public policies. Severalof the activities respond to specific needs or requests made by the main actors in this pandemic, including hospitaldirectors, health ministry authorities, mayors, and governors, and were designed and co-developed with these actors.Other contributions were academic initiatives that were made public or available to decision makers.The activities carried out (outlined below) are divided in two parts; in the first we highlight data analysis initiatives,and in the second the rapid response projects.Data analysis:- Evaluation of different models for the estimation of key indicators used by the authorities, such as the basicreproductive number (R0) and the effective number (Ref) (Section 1.1), the doubling time (DT) of the number ofcases (Section 1.2).- Analysis of patient data collected by the Ministry of Health of the Province of Buenos Aires for the developmentof models for Automatic Prognosis (Section 1.3.1), and to be able to estimate the probability that an infectedindividual needs hospitalization in Intensive Care Units (ICU) (Section 1.3.2).- Development of a portal where various indicators of the evolution of the pandemic are presented, at differentlevels of resolution: national, provincial, municipal and other geographical or administrative groups (Section 1.4)- Estimates of prevalence at the national, provincial and municipal levels based on Infection Fatality Rate (IFR)estimates and information on death counts (Section 1.5).- Analysis of different types of immunity and their consequences, considering different indicators (Section 1.6).Rapid response projects:- Development of an application that permits allocation of hospital beds within a network of hospitals, and its usein the southeastern region of Greater Buenos Aires (Section 2.1)- The Covid Prevention Center at the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires(Section 2.2)- Agent-based simulations in the Marcos Paz district of the Province of Buenos Aires (Section 2.3)Fundamental variables such as data privacy, responsible use of data, as well as the urgency of solutions and the limitedbudget available were all taken into account throughout this challenging and necessary effort to mitigate the negativeimpact of the pandemic in Argentina.