Covid-19 projects from CSA, IISc

Project 1: Lockdown and other policies for containing COVID19 in Small worlds

Authors: V. Vinay (ATI Motors) and C. Bhattacharyya (CSA, IISc)

Contact: chiru@iisc.ac.in, vinay@atimotors.com

Our aim in this project is to understand what policies can be implemented post lockdown.

Small world models are useful tools in Network Epidemiology. A city consists of many wards. We model such cities as a Multi-Lattice Small World(MLSW) network where each ward of a city is modelled as a 2D lattice and nearby wards are connected together. We simulate several interventions on MLSW and study their effectiveness in

Suppressing COVID19 on such networks. Our study highlights three findings

Usual Contact Tracing involves Tracing the immediate contacts. If that can be enhanced to Tracing the contacts and their contacts followed by Sealing(TC2S) it would have a huge impact.
A restricted work week, such as 2 day work week, followed by a Lockdown can be effective as Lockdown.
A policy such as Ward wise sealing and Opening depending on the infection levels in the ward not only has the lowest attack rate, the percentage of total population infected, but also requires the shortest time for the epidemic to end.

A preliminary draft is available here

Press coverage for the first project

Sealing areas with higher Covid-19 cases or 2-day work week with lockdown can contain virus, shorten epidemic duration: AnalysisSnehal Fernandessnehal.fernandes@hindustantimes.com Mumbai As the Centre and states discuss strategies to reopen the economy as the deadline of May 17 nears for lockdown 3.0, a...

Project 2: CovidWATCH - A rapid COVID-19 monitoring tool for regions with low smartphone penetration

Lead Developers: Niharika Venkatesh(AIfoundry) and Nabanita Paul(IISc)

Advised : Arvind Saraf(AIfoundry) and Chiranjib Bhattacharyya(IISc)

Contact: niharika@aifoundry.ai , nabanitapaul@iisc.ac.in

COLLABORATION BETWEEN INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE (IISC) & AI FOUNDRY, BENGALURU

Covid Watch is a rapid monitoring tool developed for areas with low smartphone penetration.

It offers a basic screening test based on ICMR strategy and a symptom tracker to record daily symptoms, via multi-language Whatsapp chatbot. Specifically built for people with little to no technological acumen, it also allows a single volunteer to take this test on behalf of multiple nearby people for convenience. The data is shared with the authorities in form of a dashboard, where they filter based on location, symptoms,age,etc. for subsequent follow ups. This tool has been deployed in a ward under Pune Municipality and has already helped authorities by surveying close to 3000 people in ~2 weeks.