| Summary: | COVID-19 is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and has a case-fatality rate of 2–3%, with higher rates among elderly patients and patients with comorbidities. Radiologically, COVID-19 is characterised by multifocal ground-glass opacities, even for patients with mild disease. Clinically, patients with COVID-19 present respiratory symptoms, which are very similar to other respiratory virus infections. Our knowledge regarding the SARS-CoV-2 virus is still very limited. These facts make it vitally important to establish mechanisms that allow to model and predict the evolution of the virus and to analyze the spread of cases under different circumstances. The objective of this article is to present a model developed for the evolution of COVID in the city of Manizales, capital of the Department of Caldas, Colombia, focusing on the methodology used to allow its application to other cases, as well as on the monitoring tools developed for this purpose. This methodology is based on a hybrid model which combines the population dynamics of the SIR model of differential equations with extrapolations based on recurrent neural networks. This combination provides self-explanatory results in terms of a coefficient that fluctuates with the restraint measures, which may be further refined by expert rules that capture the expected changes in such measures.
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