Whilst it seems like life is on hold during lockdown, our students are using their time productively by actively researching the fight against Covid-19, Ayesha Samarawickrama (Upper Sixth) is doing just that. In April, Ayesha successfully completed a Python bootcamp online course, and decided to use her knowledge of Python Programming Language to undertake research on mathematical modelling of infectious diseases.

We spoke to Ayesha about her research, she said: “Watching the news every night, what caught my attention was how important the mathematical model of the spread of the virus was in determining the action taken by the government and the public. So, I decided to do a project on trying to build a computational model of the spread of Covid-19 using my existing knowledge of Python Programming.

“Initially, I did some research on the mathematical model used to model viruses such as Covid-19 known as the SIR model and how the differential equations come about. Then I tried to implement this on python using sample variables for a common cold virus and displaying it graphically. It was challenging to create a program out of just equations written on paper, but because time is no longer an issue I managed to get it working and display it graphically on Python. I still haven’t been able to implement in the code variables to store real time Covid-19 data because the values are too large, but I’ve learned quite a bit about mathematical models in epidemiology and the importance of software to understand them better.”