Social, Economic, Environmental Factor Impacts and Public Health Measures on the Dynamics of COVID19

Event Type: Seminar

Date: 17 August 2021, 10:00 to 12:00

About the Event

The COVID-19 pandemic has passed its initial peak in most countries in the world, making it ripe to assess whether the basic reproduction number (R0) is different across countries and what demographic, social, and environmental factors other than interventions characterize vulnerability to the virus. In this talk, I will show the association (linear and non-linear) between COVID-19 R0 across countries and 17 demographic, social and environmental variables obtained using a generalized additive model. Moreover, I will present a mathematical model of COVID-19 that we designed and used to explore the effects of adopting various vaccination and relaxation strategies on the COVID-19 epidemiological long-term projections in Ontario. Our findings are able to provide public health bodies with important insights on the effect of adopting various mitigation strategies, thereby guiding them in the decision-making process.

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The recorded version of this live webinar is now available for viewing.

About the Speaker

Jude Kong

Jude Kong is an Assistant Professor at York University, Canada and the founding Director of the Africa-Canada Artificial Intelligence and Data Innovation Consortium (ACADIC) (http://acadic.org). Additional, he is a member of the Africa Center for Disease Modelling, a member of the Canadian Black Scientist Network, a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Mathematics for Public Health Network, and a member of the Canadian COVID-19 Modelling Rapid Response Task Force. Dr. Kong is an expert in artificial intelligence, data science, applied mathematics, mathematical modelling, infectious disease modelling and mathematics education. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has been leading an interdisciplinary team of more than 50 researchers from key academic and government institutions in nine African countries that have been leveraging Artificial Intelligence to predict and forecast COVID-19 infections in Africa. In 2020, he won a York Research Leader Award.