Projecting the Spread of COVID19 for Germany

Jean Roch Donsimoni; Rene Glawion; Bodo Plachter; Klaus Waelde

The analyses which come closest to ours are two notes by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Epidemiologie (DGfE, 2020) and by an der Heiden and Buchholz (2020). DGfE (2020) o¤er predictions based on a model similar to ours (so called SEIR models, see e.g. Anderson et al., 1992) . We present our model in detail, including the stochastic foundation, and discuss the implications of the modelling assumptions. 3 Modelling assumptions turn out to be crucial for evaluating public policy measures. We also implement in detail the e¤ects of policy measures and discuss the trade-o¤s with respect to length and strength of the evolution of the epidemic. The match of the model with the data also di¤ers. While DGfE (2020) seem to use summary statistics for their calibration, we determine the parameters of our model by …tting our model predictions to the data. This o¤ers the advantage that we can update our predictions whenever new data is available.