This is a temporary webpage that summarizes some recent modelling/data analysis work on the current COVID-19 pandemics.

In brief, we are developing a Dynamic Causal Model of the COVID pandemics (Friston et al. 2020a-b-c-d, Moran et al. 2020a-b, Daunizeau et al. 2020a-b). Our main contribution is to account for temporal changes in peoples' psychological attitude towards risks, which is influenced by broadcasted information regarding salient COVID outcomes (e.g., daily death counts), and eventually determines whether or not one will comply with social distanciation and other preventive health-related behaviours. This model however, ignores sporadic viral mutations and/or loss of acquired immunity.

You can find all related scientific papers here: https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/covid-19/

We use two data repositories:

- Our World In Data (see this ECDC github repository)

- Santé Publique France (see data.gouv.fr repository I and II)

... and the related data and VBA-compatible code can be downloaded below :)

Below is a graphical summary of analyses performed on French data (see Daunizeau et al 2020-b for more information).

Note: only hospital mortality is reported here (this does not account for, e.g., retirement homes).

One should question the reliability of the data we use in our analysis. Daily death counts, for example, are problematic for at least two reasons. First, different data repositories effectively give different numbers, e.g., people deceased in hospitals (as is the case for the data we present below), or in hospitals plus retirement homes (as for ECDC data). Second, they do not account for “normal” seasonal mortality. Testing procedures also have imperfect sensitivity and specificity, and ICU occupancy actually depends upon heterogeneous clinical criteria (e.g., respiratory support versus reanimation). All these limitations are difficult to account for, and impair the reliability of model-based predictions.