EPIDEMIC: An educational code for teaching mathematical epidemiology
Résumé
The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a collective interest in society on this issue, especially among citizens who are not experts in epidemiology. In this context, the COVID-19: Observatório Fluminense initiative, a group of independent researchers affiliated with different Brazilian institutions, developed an educational code called EPIDEMIC, which allows the generation of monitoring graphs, trends and forecasts about the spread of infectious diseases in a specific population. EPIDEMIC code is divided into three modules: modeling, trends, and forecasts. In the modeling module, compartmental models are used to simulate population dynamics during an epidemic. In the trends module, it is possible to monitor the behavior of epidemics in countries, states, or municipalities. And in the forecasts module, a statistical regressor is used to obtain predictions about the short-term behavior of epidemic curves. EPIDEMIC was developed on the free software GNU Octave and is compatible with the software MATLAB. Because EPIDEMIC is an easy-to-use tool and provides a tutorial with several examples and explanations, it is expected that this tool will contribute to the teaching and learning process and the insertion of new researchers in mathematical epidemiology. EPIDEMIC is available at www.EpidemicCode.org.