Opportunities and Challenges in Developing COVID-19 Simulation Models: Lessons from Six Funded Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic showed us the importance of modeling and forecasting efforts to guide decision makers. However, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the computational science literature lacks a proper internal exploration of the modeling journey of researchers around the world, including how they responded to the shared challenges our community faced such as data limitations, model fitting and working with public stakeholders. The current paper is a detailed examination of the internal processes of six research teams, which were funded in several countries to model COVID-19. Each team was asked to reflect on the research question and how they solved their respective modeling challenges, as well as how, looking back, they would do things differently.