The lab is involved in modelling the spread of infectious diseases like SARS-CoV-2 to study the effect of ambient aerosol particles and possible implications to environmental justice. Another study involved modelling tics that exhibit fractality – lack black carbon – which can aid the monitoring of its severity.
COVID-19 Medical Demand Forecast Archive:
We used an age-stratified metapopulation model to predict the epidemic dynamics across the 50 US states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico from March 1, 2020 to March 1, 2021. This includes weekly tracking of the state-wise basic reproduction ratio. We also made forecasts on the state-wise statistics, including:
- The epidemic curve – time evolution of the infected population
- Medical demands, that is, number of hospital and ICU beds needed
- The estimated number of unreported active COVID-19 cases
We accounted for the influence of social distancing by reducing the daily time-of-exposure (and hence the disease transmissibility) of the population targeted with various social distancing practices, such as:
- School closure (targeting population aged 1-20 years)
- Business closure (targeting population aged 21-60 years)
- Distancing elder (targeting population aged 61 years and above)
Relevant Publictions:
- Chakrabarty, R. K., Beeler, P., Liu, P., Goswami, S., Harvey, R. D., Pervez, S., van Donkelaar, A., & Martin, R. V. (2021). Ambient PM2.5 exposure and rapid spread of COVID-19 in the United States. In Science of The Total Environment (Vol. 760, p. 143391).
- Beeler, P., & Chakrabarty, R. K. (2021). Disparities in PM2.5 exposure and population density influence SARS-CoV-2 transmission among racial and ethnic minorities. In Environmental Research Letters (Vol. 16, Issue 10, p. 104046).
- Beeler, P., Jensen, N. O., Kim, S., Robichaux-Viehoever, A., Schlaggar, B. L., Greene, D. J., Black, K. J., & Chakrabarty, R. K. (2022). Fractality of tics as a quantitative assessment tool for Tourette syndrome. In Journal of The Royal Society Interface (Vol. 19, Issue 187).