Public health efforts depend heavily on predicting how diseases such as that caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus, now named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization, spread across the globe. During the early days of a new outbreak, when reliable data are still scarce, researchers turn to mathematical models that can predict where people who could be infected are going and how likely they are to bring the disease with them. These computational methods use known statistical equations that calculate the probability of individuals transmitting the illness.
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