Balancing socio-economic and public health impact of COVID-19 for its sustainable control and mitigation (SOPHIA) (SOPHIA)

Given the uncertainty about the further development of the
COVID-19 pandemie, decision makers urgently need to balance the immediate public health impact of 
the virus and the - yet uninvestigated - psychological and socio-economic impacts of the mitigation 
measures that were imposed to safeguard our health care system. Just as the spread of COVID-19 
itself, these effects are spatially heterogeneous and scale dependent, hence the need to study the 
intertwined psychological and socio-economie impacts at multiple spatial scales. To better 
understand the spatial heterogeneity of these effects, the inverse question is equally important: 
how does the socio-economie condition of a region affect both the virus spread and the impact of 
the measures?
We will consider data on suïcides, use of psychofarmaca, absenteeism due to psychological 
suffering, burnouts,... Since analysis of these data by the responsible governmental agencies lags 
at least one year, we will collect raw data and conduct (geostatistical) data analyses in relation 
to spatio-temporal variation in the measures to support decision-making on further control and 
mitigation strategies. We will use available socio-economic data at a high spatial resolution to 
infer relationships among the space­ dependent parameters in the spatial COVID-19 model, the 
observed local spread of the virus and the psychological and socio-economic response on the 
measures. At the smallest spatial scales, this will require geostatistical methods.