Modeling of Pandemics and Intervention Strategies: The COVID-19 Outbreak

Since pathogen spillovers and pandemics are unfortunately recurrent in the history of humanity, mathematical approaches to describe and mitigate the spread of infectious diseases have a long tradition. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the scientific community to model, predict, and contain the contagion, especially given the current lack of pharmaceutical interventions such as vaccines and anti-viral drugs targeting the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. The control community has quickly responded by providing new dynamic models of the epidemic outbreak, including both mean-field compartmental models and network-based models, as well as combinations of control approaches and intervention strategies to end the epidemic and recover a new normality. This entry deals with systems-and-control contributions to model epidemics and design effective intervention strategies, with a special focus on the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy.