The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has defined a strategy to promote scientific projects to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to biotechnology and nanotechnology studies, other projects are being promoted to discover the mobility pattern of the pandemic to halt the spread of the virus.

The Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems IFISC), a joint CSIC-University of the Balearic Islands centre, is working along these lines. The IFISC is coordinating a proposal on the impact of social distancing measures on the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic in Spain. The project also includes participation from the Blanes Centre for Advanced Students (CEAB-CSIC), the Institute of Economics, Geography and Demographics (IEGD-CSIC) in Madrid, the National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSC) and the Cantabria Institute of Physics (IFCA-CSIC). External collaborators include the Pompeu Fabra University, the National Centre for Epidemiology and companies such as Telefónica. The project takes into account important aspects such as spatial distribution of the population, its age breakdown, and the distribution and features of social and health care centres (hospitals, health centres, care homes), as well as assessing compliance with the containment measures. 

Publication date: Tue Mar 24 11:22:00 CET 2020