ArticleEpidemics2021
Modelling the early phase of the Belgian COVID-19 epidemic using a stochastic compartmental model and studying its implied future trajectories.
Article in Epidemics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 90 citations in OpenAlex.
- A scoping review of COVID-19 modelling studies in Belgium 2020-2024: incorporation of behaviour and lessons learned.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2026Pooled it
- Counterfactual evaluation of elementary and secondary school policies in the COVID-19 pandemic.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Evaluating COVID-19 vaccine allocation policies using Bayesian m-top exploration.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Estimating the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infections by jointly modelling seroprevalence, hospitalization and mortality data, February 2020 - January 2021, Belgium.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2026Article
- The role of frailty in shaping social contact patterns in Belgium, 2022-2023.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Assessing the role of children in the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium using perturbation analysis.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The Peculiar Emergence of Mpox (Monkeypox): Directions for the Search for the Natural Reservoir and Vaccination Strategies.Vaccines · 2024Article
- Repetition in social contacts: implications in modelling the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases in pre-pandemic and pandemic settings.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- The impact of quality-adjusted life years on evaluating COVID-19 mitigation strategies: lessons from age-specific vaccination roll-out and variants of concern in Belgium (2020-2022).BMC public health · 2024Article
- The relationship between compartment models and their stochastic counterparts: A comparative study with examples of the COVID-19 epidemic modeling.Journal of biomedical research · 2024Article
- Wording the trajectory of the three-year COVID-19 epidemic in a general population - Belgium.BMC public health · 2024Article
- Translating the COVID-19 epidemiological situation into policies and measures: the Belgian experience.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Serological screening in a large-scale municipal survey in Cascais, Portugal, during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic: lessons for future pandemic preparedness efforts.Frontiers in public health · 2024Article
- Exploring the impact of population ageing on the spread of emerging respiratory infections and the associated burden of mortality.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Explicit modeling of antibody levels for infectious disease simulations in the context of SARS-CoV-2.iScience · 2023Article
- The direct disease burden of COVID-19 in Belgium in 2020 and 2021.BMC public health · 2023Article
- How contact patterns during the COVID-19 pandemic are related to pre-pandemic contact patterns and mobility trends.BMC infectious diseases · 2023Article
- Mobility and the spatial spread of sars-cov-2 in Belgium.Mathematical biosciences · 2023Article
- Fractal dimension based geographical clustering of COVID-19 time series data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The COVID-19 pandemic in various restriction policy scenarios based on the dynamic social contact rate.Heliyon · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Following the onset of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic throughout the world, a large fraction of the global population is or has been under strict measures of physical distancing and quarantine, with many countries being in partial or full lockdown. These measures are imposed in order to reduce the spread of the disease and to lift the pressure on healthcare systems. Estimating the impact of such interventions as well as monitoring the gradual relaxing of these stringent measures is quintessential to understand how resurgence of the COVID-19 epidemic can be controlled for in the future. In this paper we use a stochastic age-structured discrete time compartmental model to describe the transmission of COVID-19 in Belgium. Our model explicitly accounts for age-structure by integrating data on social contacts to (i) assess the impact of the lockdown as implemented on March 13, 2020 on the number of new hospitalizations in Belgium; (ii) conduct a scenario analysis estimating the impact of possible exit strategies on potential future COVID-19 waves. More specifically, the aforementioned model is fitted to hospital admission data, data on the daily number of COVID-19 deaths and serial serological survey data informing the (sero)prevalence of the disease in the population while relying on a Bayesian MCMC approach. Our age-structured stochastic model describes the observed outbreak data well, both in terms of hospitalizations as well as COVID-19 related deaths in the Belgian population. Despite an extensive exploration of various projections for the future course of the epidemic, based on the impact of adherence to measures of physical distancing and a potential increase in contacts as a result of the relaxation of the stringent lockdown measures, a lot of uncertainty remains about the evolution of the epidemic in the next months.
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