Computational simulation of the COVID-19 epidemic with the SEIR stochastic model.

A small number of individuals infected within a community can lead to the rapid spread of the disease throughout that community, leading to an epidemic outbreak. This is even more true for highly contagious diseases such as COVID-19, known to be caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Mathematical models of epidemics allow estimating several impacts on the population and, therefore, are of great use for the definition of public health policies. Some of these measures include the isolation of the infected (also known as quarantine), and the vaccination of the susceptible. In a possible scenario in which a vaccine is available, but with limited access, it is necessary to quantify the levels of vaccination to be applied, taking into account the continued application of preventive measures. This work concerns the simulation of the spread of the COVID-19 disease in a community by applying the Monte Carlo method to a Susceptible-Exposed-Infective-Recovered (SEIR) stochastic epidemic model. To handle the computational effort involved, a simple parallelization approach was adopted and deployed in a small HPC cluster. The developed computational method allows to realistically simulate the spread of COVID-19 in a medium-sized community and to study the effect of preventive measures such as quarantine and vaccination. The results show that an effective combination of vaccination with quarantine can prevent the appearance of major epidemic outbreaks, even if the critical vaccination coverage is not reached.

General Data Protection Regulation in Health Clinics.

The focus on personal data has merited the EU concerns and attention, resulting in the legislative change regarding privacy and the protection of personal data. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to reform existing measures on the protection of personal data of European Union citizens, with a strong impact on the rights and freedoms of individuals in establishing rules for the processing of personal data. The GDPR considers a special category of personal data, the health data, being these considered as sensitive data and subject to special conditions regarding treatment and access by third parties. This work presents the evolution of the applicability of the Regulation (EU) 2016/679 six months after its application in Portuguese health clinics. The results of the present study are discussed in the light of future literature and work are identified.