Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Mathematisch-Naturwissen­schaft­liche Fakultät - Institut für Physik

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Mathematisch-Naturwissen­schaft­liche Fakultät | Institut für Physik | Kolloquium | Alle Termine | Institutskolloquium: Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann (Institut für Biologie der HU Berlin und RKI)

Institutskolloquium: Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann (Institut für Biologie der HU Berlin und RKI)

Vortrag zum Thema "Understanding the Covid-19 Pandemic - What physicists can contribute (and what they shouldn’t)"
  • Wann 08.06.2021 von 15:15 bis 17:00
  • Wo Zoom
  • iCal

Institutskolloquium: Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann (Institut für Biologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und Robert-Koch-Institut) spricht zum Thema "Understanding the Covid-19 Pandemic - What physicists can contribute (and what they shouldn’t)".

Der Kolloquiumsvortrag wird virtuell mithilfe von Zoom durchgeführt. Die Anmeldedaten werden im Vorfeld über die üblichen Mailverteiler versandt oder können unter gd-at-physik.hu-berlin.de erfragt werden.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic is a global, ongoing crisis that unfolds along many scales. Understanding the dynamics of the pandemic requires the integration and entanglement of knowledge, skills and expertise from many areas of research, virology, epidemiology, biology, medical research, sociology, economics, and psychology. Physics, as a field, is usually not perceived as a key scientific discipline that would enter the stage of understanding the phenomenon.Yet, especially the field of modelling, computational forecasts and infectious disease dynamics is dominated by scientists that originally received training as physicists. I will discuss the key reasons behind this, explain why Germany lags substantially in infectious disease dynamics research compared to other countries and offer some explanations. I will discuss a number of projects that we initiated to understand the Covid-19 pandemic, ranging from early assessment models for estimating the global import risk that are based on the worldwide air-transporation, the discovery of generic sub-exponential growth curves in the first epidemic waves observed in Chines provinces, the Covid-19 mobility monitor and how it help to quantify the impact of lockdown measures and corona-fatigue, and finally the Corona Data Donation Project in which we analysed daily heart rates, step counts and sleep patterns of over half a million citizens to devise a fever thermometer for Germany.