Project's goals

by A. RIOS, J. OLIVEIRA, M. RODRIGUES, P. RAMOS

The epidemic of the new Covid-19 brought, without a doubt, a curious scenario. Thanks to the diversity of initiatives, we have access to a daily updated set of data containing information on confirmed and discarded cases, tests, occupation of hospital beds, and others. This information is made available on a time and space scale, providing analysis in monitoring the pandemic at aggregate levels by states or municipalities. This allows a large number of people to use this information in models, often not adequate, to build plots and, according to their interest, to disclose a certain scenario.

In this context, the proposal to develop an Interactive Platform for evaluating scenarios and mathematical models aims to create an environment that allows exploring these data as well as their use in different models, adjusted in real time to the data, such:

1. the user understands the limitations of the model,
2. use it correctly for scenario assessment, and
3. be able to compare the impact of the chosen model in the predicted scenario.

The proposal in question intends to offer, in a robust way, a tool that can be used by researchers, managers and others in such a way that they can:

• interact with the different type of data available in Brazil;
• evaluate the effect of measures taken on the epidemic curve of interest;
• making projections on short time scales (i.e. 7 - 10 days);
• verify the behavior of epidemic scenarios on long time scales (ie.> 100 days);
• and access metrics that assist in the decision-making process, such as the effective reproductive number, usually denoted by Rt , which estimates the average number of secondary infections that an individual, infected at time t, is able to generate.

For the project's success, a Shinny platform containing the most frequent models used during the Covid-19 pandemic will be built. Concomitantly, a database containing the time series for each municipality in Brazil will be maintained based on data released at: Brasil.io - Ministry of Health and State Departments.

Before the modeling process, a set of rules will be created and the model will only be adjusted to the regions of interest that meet these assumptions. The results obtained for each model will be made available in the form of an interactive panel with a saving of dialog boxes, explaining how the information should be used as well as the main limitations or errors inherent to the process. The Platform will be built so that more models can be incorporated.