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As reported by the National University of Colombia, professors and students from the Physics Department have been working on a series of mathematical models to establish how the new coronavirus spreads.
Since February of this year, even before the virus reached the country, The researchers hypothesized about contagions on public transportation.
The work was carried out in the University’s Sociophysics and Sociophysics groups, when the coronavirus was just spreading through some countries in Europe and Asia.
“At that time many people did not believe that the pandemic was going to come, or that it could be so important. For us there were already signs that it could be.”, relates Rafael Hurtado, professor in the Physics Department of the National University.
These studies are part of a work led by the National Institute of Health (INS), in which several universities participate. With the results, suggestions are made to public entities.
“What we did was to move a single ‘infected’ into the system to see, according to the characteristics of the environment, how many people could be infected,” said Professor Hurtado.
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The model classifies people into three types: ‘susceptible’, ‘exposed’ and ‘infected’.
The ‘susceptible‘ They are all people who are on public transport, while the ‘exposed’ are those who acquire the virus, although they have not yet transmitted it. The ‘infected’, meanwhile, are those who carry the virus and, in addition, can spread it to others.
Additionally, ten stations and a series of buses known as ‘easy route’ were taken into consideration. In them, the ‘infected’ passenger would spend around an hour and a half.
Using an algorithm, the model determines how many people are infected by each infected individual. Of course, This number varies in relation to the number of people with whom you have contact.
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What the model points out is that, on a normal day, the ‘infected’ can have, on average, 7 people around, which means that there are 20 ‘exposed’ subjects on their trip. But if in that journey the contact is reduced to an average of 6 people, the model shows that only 10 would be ‘exposed’.
This is explained because the people who are around are generally not the same and are constantly changing. It may be that on a bus ride, the individual meets 7 people nearby, but when getting off at a certain station, the number of people decreases to 6.
The idea is to keep that number as low as possible and that in all public transport spaces, the possible ‘infected’ encounter the fewest number of individuals around during their journey.
As the number of people around the ‘infected’ decreases, the probability of contagion decreases quadratically.
Professor Rafael Hurtado maintains that the fundamental result of the model is not what is expressed in these specific figures, but rather the general phenomenon that can be glimpsed from them.
“The important thing is the trend it gives: as the number of people around the ‘infected’ decreases, the probability of contagion quadratically decreases “Hurtado explains.
(Read on: What have countries done where no coronavirus cases have shot up?)
In other words, reducing crowds within buses and stations would, in the long run, produce a multiplied decrease in the number of people ‘infected’ with the new coronavirus. This also helps broaden the concept of ‘social distancing’: not only do we have to make sure that there is a distance that separates people, but we also have to avoid having many of them in the same space.
These works have allowed to feed a collaborative process with several institutions. Many of the results that have been found were sent with recommendations to the companies that operate the transport systems of cities such as Bogotá and Medellín, who since the beginning of the quarantine have begun to implement social distancing measures.
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For example, the Bogotá Mobility Secretariat established that construction workers, which was the first sector authorized to resume operations in the capital, could not use TransMilenio until after 9 a.m. m. In the same way it happens with the manufacturing sector from May 11.
However, it seems inevitable that more people begin to use public transport with the progressive relaxation of the quarantine.
According to Mobility, for March 5 of this year there were 3’608.571 trips throughout the Integrated Public Transportation System of Bogotá. On April 30, when the quarantine was already in force, the Bogota citizens made 767,354 trips and last May 7th that figure amounted to 791,021 routes.
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