Stochastic modeling, analysis, and simulation of the COVID-19 pandemic with explicit behavioral changes in Bogotá: A case study

David Niño-Torres; Andrés Ríos-Gutiérrez; Viswanathan Arunachalam; Comfort Ohajunwa; Padmanabhan Seshaiyer

doi:10.1016/j.idm.2021.12.008

Stochastic modeling, analysis, and simulation of the COVID-19 pandemic with explicit behavioral changes in Bogotá: A case study

Infect Dis Model. 2022 Mar;7(1):199-211. doi: 10.1016/j.idm.2021.12.008. Epub 2021 Dec 31.

Authors

David Niño-Torres¹, Andrés Ríos-Gutiérrez¹, Viswanathan Arunachalam¹, Comfort Ohajunwa², Padmanabhan Seshaiyer²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Statistics, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia.
² George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA.

Abstract

In this paper, a stochastic epidemiological model is presented as an extension of a compartmental SEIR model with random perturbations to analyze the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic in the city of Bogotá D.C., Colombia. This model incorporates the spread of COVID-19 impacted by social behaviors in the population and allows for projecting the number of infected, recovered, and deceased individuals considering the mitigation measures, namely confinement and partial relaxed restrictions. Also, the role of randomness using the concept of Brownian motion is emphasized to explain the behavior of the population. Computational experiments for the stochastic model with random perturbations were performed, and the model is validated through numerical simulations for actual data from Bogotá D.C.

Keywords: Compartmental modeling; Epidemic spread; Parameter estimation; SARS-CoV-2; Stochastic perturbations.