THE ROLE OF COMPLEXITY SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICAL MODELLING IN FIGHTING THE PANDEMIC

Benjamin Maier (Personal webpage)

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been dictating our lives for more than two years now. While health care workers and medical staff are combating the pandemic on an individual level by pharmaceutical means, public health researchers are working to mitigate the disease’s spread by constantly estimating risks and trying to inform policy makers on efficient ways to mitigate this global crisis. Often, such efforts are supported by means of mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, a discipline with an almost century-long tradition that has been successfully used in numerous past local and global health crises. The field is deeply connected to core principles of Complexity Science, be it the dependence on non-linear effects, its use of network science, or its inherent transdisciplinary nature. Here, we reflect on our work at Germany’s central public health institute over the last ~2yrs. We discuss how heterogeneities of human mobility and behavior on different scales can be incorporated in spreading models to improve assessments and predictions of infection waves and how these models are connected to other complex systems. We reflect on our own work at Germany's central public health institute, touching subjects like (i) how human mobility data can be used to estimate forthcoming infection dynamics, (ii) which non-pharmaceutical interventions can be/were used un/successfully, and (iii) how risk-induced changes of human behavior introduce feedback loops that can dominate infection dynamics.