Synthetic population data for Belgium for STRIDE

This repository contains population files with 11 million individuals for Belgium we used to explore the impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on Belgian deconfinement strategies after the COVID-19 related lockdown in 2020 (Willem et al 2021) and universal testing strategies for COVID-19 mitigation (Libin et al 2021).

We created census-based synthetic populations for Belgium consisting of individuals that are part of “contact pools”, representing a household, school-class, workplace, or community.

References:

Willem L, Abrams S, Libin JK P, Petrof O, Coletti P, Kuylen E,  Møgelmose S, Wambua J, Herzog S A, Faes C, SIMID COVID19 team, Beutels P, Hens N: The impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on deconfinement strategies for COVID-19. Nature Communications 12, 1524 (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21747-7).

Libin JK P, Willem L, Verstraeten T, Torneri A, Vanderlocht J, Hens N. Assessing the feasibility and effectiveness of household-pooled universal testing to control COVID-19 epidemics. PLoS Computational Biology 17(3): e1008688 (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008688)