In four weeks the UPV will have a prototype of its COVID-19 simulator

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What effect would a 50% reduction in contacts between children and older people have, with or without a mask? And a confinement by neighborhoods? What if educational centers opened? These are some of the scenarios that can be simulated by Loimos , a new computer tool in whose development researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) are participating and whose first prototype is ready in four weeks.

It will allow us to simulate and evaluate the effects of different epidemiological scenarios of COVID-19 and predict the evolution of the pandemic in the face of future mutations of the virus, in what are predicted to be new waves of the disease. «This is a simulator that contemplates possible scenarios for the pandemic. We have adjusted a series of parameters so that we can know what will happen to the virus based on these parameters ," explains José Mª Sempere , from the Research Group on Automata, Formal Languages ​​and Their Applications (ALFA)-VRAIN Institute of the UPV.

The project is led by the Foundation for Biomedical Research of the Ramón y Cajal University Hospital (FIBio-HRC) and has the collaboration of the technology company Biotech Vana SL . It is also one of the proposals selected from the call for research projects on SARS-COV-2 and the COVID 19 disease promoted by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the Carlos III Health Institute .

According to Sempere, Loimos will be developed under the membrane Email Data computing paradigm , which allows designing the behavior of the virus in various environments. «We program on the computer as if it were a living eukaryotic human cell. So, the compartment of that cell is what induces the compartment of the program ," says the UPV researcher who explains that the first simulations carried out once the prototype is ready will be in hospital environments to know " how its propagation occurs. in hospitals" .



“The virtual design of the biological behavior of the virus and the actions of all the elements that surround it such as infected, healthy and recovered people, decisions about isolation in public spaces (departments in hospitals, schools, companies...), the hierarchization of the territories in physical areas (neighborhoods, municipalities, provinces...), etc. "They will allow us to evaluate the incidence of the virus under different situations designed 'à la carte' and to observe its evolution in temporal projections ," explains Sempere .