What Motivates a Book on Pandemic modeling….a Pandemic!

The COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2019–2020 has been responsible for millions of deaths and has led to a huge interest in modeling and simulation of infectious diseases. There are numerous topics associated with this epoch-changing event, such as (1) macroscale disease propagation, (2) microscale transmission, (3) pathogenic decontamination, (4) vaccine design, etc. This is an evolving field. The targeted objective of this book is to introduce researchers to key topics in this area, in a very concise manner.

It is important to emphasize that the rapid speed at which modern simulations operate makes the presented computational tools easily deployable as digital-twins, i.e., digital replicas of complex systems that can be inexpensively and safely optimized in a virtual setting and then used in the physical world afterwards, thus reducing the costs of experiments and also accelerating development of new technologies. 

The topics selected for discussion have evolved with the progression of the pandemic. Beyond the introductory chapter on basic mathematics, optimization and machine-learning, the monograph covers four themes in modeling and simulation of infectious diseases, specifically:

• Part 1: Macroscale disease propagation,
• Part 2: Microscale disease transmission and ventilation system design,
• Part 3: Ultraviolet viral decontamination and
• Part 4: Vaccine design and immune response.

My interest in the propagation of pathogens stems back a decade before working for the department of defense on mitigation pathogen propagation in the event of terrorism or biowarfare. Weaponized pathogens have been a concern for many years and many modern computational tools and models have been developed.

At the end of 2019, I started tracking the pathogen that became known as CV19. Simultaneously, with my colleagues at UC Davis, we began constructing what would be the successful proposal to found AIFS. We included some aspects of pathogenic control in agricultural systems in the proposal. As the pandemic grew from January 2020 to June 2020, it became clear that the CV19 Pandemic was not a passing transient….people close to me were dying. When my father died of respiratory failure during the pandemic, it became clear that this was no longer hypothetical-it became quite personal. The monograph, which was generously supported by AIFS, is an outgrowth of this era and is dedicated to my father, Magd E. Zohdi (1933–2020) and the millions of victims of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This is not going to be the last pandemic-the CV19 event was just a mild “warmup’’. The likelihood of large-scale propagation of zoonotic (animal origin) pathogens is increasing due to (1) higher density of humans (2) larger wildland urban interfaces (3) climate change producing different migration patterns of wildlife and (4) ever-growing large-scale agriculture. Thus, we need a prepped scientific workforce that is familiar with modeling and simulation of infectious diseases, before the next pandemic. Learning on the fly during the next, potentially more severe pandemic, would be truly catastrophic.

The book is free to students, faculty and staff whose university has a Springer subscription and can be found here https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-18053-8

This work is supported by AFRI Competitive Grant no. 2020-67021-32855/project accession no. 1024262 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

This grant is being administered through AIFS: the AI Institute for Next Generation Food Systems. https://aifs.ucdavis.edu.