Modified SEIR model for COVID-19 outbreak in Spain

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) outbreak has been ongoing for over 5 months now and has spread to nearly every country in the world from its initial outbreak in Wuhan, China. Europe, specially Italy and Spain, has been one of the most affected areas by the virus, although there are now many other epicenters surging in other areas, such as North and South America. In this project we will try to model the disease spread in our home country Spain and try to find some useful parameters to analyze and characterize the outbreak. We have thus tried to implement a modified SEIR model that includes the effects of the lockdown imposed on March 14th by the Spanish government. Creating and estimating the model parameters has proven to be a rather difficult task for us, since the data involving this disease is often unreliable and under continuous modification of criteria. That's the reason why we have only achieved to model the outbreak up to a point and, given time and difficulty constraints, we have been forced to settle for the results obtained. The algorithm for the fitting of the model and estimation of the parameters was initially implemented in R language, but due to complications and the authors' familiarity with the MATLAB environment, the latter was chosen in the end.2019/202