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Decision and Infrastructure Sciences

CityCOVID

Our researchers use high-performance computing resources and agent-based modeling to understand how the virus spreads through populations.

Contributing to the Fight Against COVID-19

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought epidemiological modeling to the forefront of discussions on how evidence-based decision making can be supported in times of crisis and uncertainty. As COVID-19 has become one of the greatest challenges of our lifetime, scientists and researchers are using the laboratory’s supercomputer Theta to develop epidemiological models that simulate the spread of COVID-19 through Chicago and beyond.

Argonne has developed CityCOVID, a detailed agent-based model that represents the behaviors, contacts, and COVID-19 disease progression of millions of residents in a large urban area.

Throughout the epidemic, members of our group have been regularly meeting with city, county and state stakeholders, and providing them with CityCOVID model outputs in response to their evolving priorities.

Geographic application of CityCOVID

CityCOVID is a regional scale agent-based model of the people in a large metropolitan area, currently being applied to Chicago and surrounding counties in northeast Illinois. The data underlying CityCOVID came from Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) and Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) sources on COVID-19 cases in Illinois, in addition to literature on COVID-19 epidemiology. Learn How the Model Works.

Funding Acknowledgement

Research supported by the DOE Office of Science through the National Virtual Biotechnology Laboratory (NVBL), a consortium of DOE national laboratories focused on response to COVID-19, with funding provided by the Coronavirus CARES Act.

CityCOVID Modeling

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Learn more about Argonne’s research related to COVID-19