The spread of COVID-19 pandemic compelled an unprecedented course of action, such as travel restrictions and stay-at-home orders, to quell outbreaks and manage healthcare capacity in different countries around the world. In this talk, I will summarize several key epidemiological characteristics of COVID-19 and highlight its public health challenges. I will present some recent modelling efforts of our research team and contributions towards understanding the dynamics of transmission and control of COVID-19 in the context of current and future interventions.

Seyed Moghadas is a professor of Computational Epidemiology and Applied Mathematics at York University. He is the founding director of the Agent-Based Modelling Laboratory established under the auspices of the Canadian Foundation for Innovation to develop “Quantitative Methods and Infrastructure for Rapid, Evidence-Based Decision Support in Public Health”. He also chairs the Canadian research team of Pan-InfORM (Pandemic Influenza Outbreak Research Modelling). He is the principal investigator in a number of international projects pertaining to the global containment of COVID-19.

Links to lab and research outputs http://abm-lab.yorku.ca and http://eid.yorku.ca