Diseases have affecting human life since ever there have been human beings and now a day, the novel CORONA VIRUS comes up like a grudge to us. Due to this virus approx. 210 countries and their territories are under Lockdown. All are searching for the cure or prevention techniques to prevent this virus from spreading.
Widely known but highly powerful field of science working in the background to unpick the mysteries of infectious diseases is mathematics. As I explore in Mathematics of Life and Death, math epidemiology is playing a vital role in fighting against diseases such as COVID-19.
With some basic mathematical models, researchers begin to forecast the progression of diseases and understand the effect of interventions on disease spread.
The S-I-R model
One of the simplest mathematical models of disease spread is S-I_R which splits the population into three basic categories according to disease status.
- Susceptible: People who have not yet had the disease.
- Invectives: People who have contracted the disease and are capable of passing it to susceptible.
- Removed: People who have had the disease and recovered and now immune, or those who died.
Everyone is assumed to be born susceptible and capable of being infected by the invectives. But a removed individual no longer contributes to the spread of the disease.
This referred to as the S-I-R model. This model vital lesson for how to prevent disease spreading from Dengue fever( Latin America) to Swine fever (Netherlands). The S-I-R model illustrates that how social isolation is important for those infected. By staying quarantine until fully recovered, you effectively take yourself from the infected class straight to the removed class.
Using this mathematical model, the professor of mathematics Tom Britton can calculate how fast the coronavirus is likely to spread. They said that the answer depends very much on what prevention measures have been taken by ourselves and by the governing bodies. They further elaborate that what control the answer is R (Reproduction number, which is the number of individuals that a typical infected person on average infects at the beginning of the epidemic). It is estimated that the reproduction number R, is 2.5 before any restrictions. Then 60-70 % will be infected. If we manage to reduce this number of reproduction with different techniques then fewer will be infected. The magic number is R=1. As soon as we get the reproduction number below 1 with different measures, it will quickly vanish.
So in this way, mathematics and mathematicians will have played a significant role in the way in which the drama panned out.
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