• Health.Coronavirus, last minute | Seven of the 150 infected in Spain are in the ICU

The coronavirus travels following the usual movements of the population. This is the basis of the mathematical model developed by researchers from the Universities of Zaragoza and Rovira and Virgili of Tarragona to predict the risk of new cases of infection not diagnosed in a "race against the clock" to contain the spread of the virus, reported Javier Ortega.

And how does the population move? The National Statistics Institute (INE) has data available through a survey of how these displacements occur. Taking into account these data - which are not those obtained from mobile operators - researchers have developed a model that allows to show at the municipal level the probability that a neighbor of that population has contracted the infection "by community contagion".

The map offers the possibility of consulting the probable spread risk of Covid-19, updated with the information available as of March 3, which can also be consulted on the project website.

The model has been developed by the following members. On behalf of the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Alex Arenas (principal investigator and coordinator), Sergio Gómez, Benjamin Steinegger and Joan Matamalas (researcher at Harvard Medical School). On the side of the University of Zaragoza, there are Jesús Gómez-Gardeñes (principal investigator), Clara Granell, David Soriano and Wesley Cota (visiting researcher at the Federal University of Viçosa).

The areas with the greatest risk of infection appear darker in color. They are those that already have diagnosed cases, as well as large cities or towns better connected with them, since there are more displacements between these places. The figures range from a probability of 0.00001% of the infected population to 0.08%.

Problems updating the data

The update of this map is complicated at times. While new cases of infected in our country are known, the teams of both universities have to locate the municipality of residence of each affected. There is, however, no source of public information that offers this data systematically.

"If we do not receive help from the administration ..." comments the project coordinator and doctor of Physics and Professor at Rovira i Virgili, Alex Arenas . For the model to work, "it is key to know from which municipality it comes from" each affected, he explains. So far, the source of this data is what the press publishes, but not all the information is provided by the locality, so these researchers trace by all means to try to locate the best possible positives by coronavirus. "Getting this data is now the bottleneck so we can continue updating the map."

The World has contacted the Ministry of Health to request information on the municipality of each of the cases confirmed so far, in addition to other data such as age, sex or the focus of infection, given the high number of cases imported from Italy in our country.

From the Ministry they indicate that this information depends on the health departments of each autonomous community and that, although they also have it at the Carlos III Health Institute, its dissemination is not planned in the short term. They indicate from the agency that the usual thing is, once the epidemic is over, to publish comprehensive reports about its incidence, as is done in the case of influenza and other conditions.

This, however, prevents the work of researchers who intend to "predict and quantify the emergence of possible new cases". "The result of not having an early detection significantly influences the spread of the epidemic," they say on their website, which also includes the limitations of the model.

This research has already caught the attention of the scientific community in Portugal and the United States. In fact, there are already conversations with the neighboring country for extrapolation. "If the Government of Portugal collaborates, it could be the case that we have better information for them than for Spain," says Arenas.

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  • Coronavirus

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