General Assembly SamenSlimOpen
Food for thought
30 September 2021
How does SARS-CoV-2 spread through spaces? How do people schedule their activities in a restaurant setting? Which event scenarios pose severe risks of SARS-CoV-2 spread? These seemingly unrelated questions were front and centre at the General Assembly of the SamenSlimOpen project.
This multi-disciplinary workshop on the microscopic modelling of disease spreading took place at the Schielandhuis in Rotterdam. Researchers from Wageningen University and Research, Delft University of Technology and the Erasmus Medical Centre met up to discuss the progress of the SamenSlimOpen project. During the workshop, doctoral researchers and university staff presented their latest work featuring movement dynamics modelling, and disease spread.
Amongst other interesting talks, Busra Atamer Balkan presented the latest version of QVEmod and provided details on their attempts to calibrate this model using Cluster data. She further illustrated how vaccination can reduce the risk of superspreading events in indoor settings. Martijn Sparnaaij provided a detailed description of an extension of the microscopic pedestrian model Nomad for hospitality settings. He elaborated upon the new user-driven scheduling model that allows users to mimic the choices that visitors make in restaurants and cafes. Xinyi Wang presented her MSc thesis work, which develops a computationally effective method to assess the infection risks at large-scale events in the Netherlands. She illustrated the functioning of this method by means of a nice case study that studied the implications of 10 infected visitors at a large NL event with 10.000 visitors. Dorine Duives studied the impact of infected travellers at a train station.
Even though the SamenSlimOpen project is almost finished, lots of open questions remain. Therefore, the workshop ended with a brainstorm on the potential application of the new tooling and ways to solve the challenges that still remain.
Speakers at the GA (incl. hyperlinks to personal profiles):
Quirine ten Bosch, Assistant Professor, Quantitative Veterinary Epidemiology, Wageningen University and Research
Busra Atamer Balkan, Research Associate, Quantitative Veterinary Epidemiology, Wageningen University and Research
Martijn Sparnaaij, Doctoral researcher, Active Mode lab, Transport & Planning, Delft University of Technology
Xinyi Wang, MSc. student, Transport & Planning, Delft University of Technology
