Abstract:
After a short introduction providing some facts and figures about the COVID-19 pandemic we will present a few compartment models for the spread of respiratory infectious diseases that can be applied to COVID-19. For a particularly simple model we will present some parameter estimation results and make a remark on difficulties arising from incomplete data. Moreover, we shall explain some features of the waves observed in Germany (and elsewhere) in terms of intrinsic behavior of the models. Finally, we present a collaborative effort to compare short term forecasts generated from a wide variety of models and to improve the quality of predictions by aggregating different types of models.