New Publication
IFAE COVID-19 Group Publishes Final Study on Catalonia’s Pandemic Response in Scientific Reports
January 7, 2025
IFAEOn 30-12-2024 the IFAE COVID-19 group published in Scientific Reports from the Nature Multidisciplinary Collections its second and final paper ‘An Agent-Based Simulation of COVID-19 History in Catalonia Using Extensive Real Datasets’. The study highlights the impact of non-pharmaceutical measures and vaccination on COVID-19 spread in Catalonia.
When the COVID-19 pandemics started, a group of IFAE researchers led a multidisciplinary effort integrated by members of the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics (CED) and the Foundation for Advanced Digital Technologies (i2CAT).
The group obtained financial support from the PANDÈMIES 2020 program of the Generalitat de Catalunya, and granted access to anonymous health data of diagnosed patients, as well as vaccination data from Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya (AQuAS). Leveraging disaggregated socio-demographic microdata from census, mobile phone data and health data, including social determinants, age-specific strata, and mobility patterns, wthrthe group designed a comprehensive network model of Catalonia’s population and, through numerical simulation, assessed its response to the outbreak of COVID-19 over the two-year period 2020-21. Their findings underscore the critical importance of timely implementation of broad non-pharmaceutical measures and effective vaccination campaigns in curbing virus spread. The figure shows a comparison between simulated and real data for the Catalan population during 2020-2021.
An Agent-Based Simulation of COVID-19 History in Catalonia Using Extensive Real Datasets M. Bosman, Y. Cordon, M. Duran-Sala, L. Gabbanelli, C. García-Pérez, X. Jordan, M. Manera, P. Masjuan, A. Medina, Ll.M. Mir, A. Oròs, and V. Vitagliano

Event
Radical Science at CCCB
May 9, 2025
The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) is hosting two conferences as part of the Radical Science series, focused on the origins of the universe and life.
On May 15, Nobel Laureate Didier Queloz and astrobiologist Nathalie Cabrol will discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, exploring the more than 5,000 exoplanets discovered and the techniques to detect signs of life in their atmospheres.
The following day, on May 16, astrophysicists Gabriela González and Eugenio Coccia will explore how gravitational wave detection opens new avenues for understanding the cosmos, allowing us to study the early universe and phenomena like black hole mergers.