Over the following months Belgian society will be asked to adapt its
behavior in order to keep the COVID-19 outbreak under control and
not to jeopardise our healthcare system. This calls for an expertbased
policy that is supported by accurate medium-term model
forecasts on the further COVID-19 progression to assess the impacts
of possible control and containment measures. For that purpose, we
will start from established population-based SEIR-models and extend
these to account for age- and space-dependent disease dynamics,
the stochasticity intrinsic to disease spread and hospital bed capacity.
These extended models will be complemented with a socioeconomic
model to quantify the effects of measures on consumption, labor
supply and economic activity. Finally, a controller will be developed
that interacts with the aforementioned models to identify the optimal
set of control and mitigation measures. The extended and holistic
SEIR modeling framework offers a solid basis for providing Belgian
healthcare institutions and policy makers with more accurate
predictions. Currently, the consortium already provides short-term
forecasts to policy makers, and hence it has all connections and
simple models in place to guarantee a swift delivery of improved
tools.