Abstract
Emerging and reemerging pathogens are latent threats in our society with the risk of killing millions of people worldwide, without forgetting the severe economic and educational backlogs. The spread of pathogens from one individual to another can be abstract in mathematical terms, helping public health agencies with predictions of the pandemic and evaluating possible scenarios. Nevertheless, modeling disease transmission is a central vexation for the scientific community—this involves several complex and dynamic processes. The emerging pathogen SARS-CoV-2 has led us to long terms of confinement and social isolation. Many lessons have been learned during COVID-19; a very important one is that mathematics is a central tool to follow uncharted territories during pandemics.
This chapter aims to put in perspective the subsequent chapters presented in this book, which are a collection of mathematical models, computational simulations, and artificial intelligence approaches that were employed during the COVID-19 pandemic.