On Monday, June 16, 2023, at 12:00 p.m. c.t., the next meeting of our Physics Colloquium will take place.
Speaker is DP Dr. Philip Bechtle (University of Bonn) on "Soccer, Phyics Modelling, Social Habits and COVID Data"..
The fundamental properties of the pandemic spread of SARS-CoV-2 have been understood very early. However, it remains difficult to this day to exactly quantify the impact of minute changes in social behavior - it is a great virtue of free societies that they are very diverse, which at the same time poses extreme challenges on the modeling of pandemic spread under a variety of variable conditions. We have taken on the effort to use a semi-controlled and semi-random social experiment - the UEFA European Soccer Championship 2020, which happened in June and July 2021 - as a laboratory for trying to assign COVID cases to behavioral changes, and in turn to check whether the fundamental parameters governing COVID spread on the long term also apply for predicting the impact of short-term behavioral changes.
Previous studies have generally found inconclusive results or no impact of the UEFA 2020 championship on COVID spread, since they mostly focused on local infections in the stadium, which are negligible on a national scale. Instead of this approach, we make use of established social habits - the gender imbalance among soccer fans, causing an expected asymmetry in COVID infections between genders directly after matches - and the known time structure of matches, where we assume the strongest effect in the countries of the playing parties, and not in the country where the match happens.
We apply a Bayesian analysis modeling the gender asymmetry, the infection and detection delay structure, the weekday-dependent reporting delays, the time-variable underlying gender-symmetric infection dynamics, and including all secondary cases.
The results vary significantly between European countries, which then allows to study the dependence of the UEFA 2020 related infections on the observed infection dynamics in each country.
Abstract of the presentation by Dr. Bechtle.
The introduction will be given by Prof. Dr. Anna Franckowiak.
The faculty cordially invites all interested parties. The event will take place in lecture hall HNB and hybrid via Zoom. Before the colloquium we offer coffee and cookies. This link will take you to the Zoom event (meetingID: 632 5520 9938, password: 526977). All dates of the Physics Colloquium can be found here.