This repository contains population files with 11 million individuals for Belgium we used to explore the impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on Belgian deconfinement strategies after the COVID-19 related lockdown in 2020 (Willem et al 2021) and universal testing strategies for COVID-19 mitigation (Libin et al 2021). We created census-based synthetic populations for Belgium consisting of individuals that are part of “contact pools”, representing a household, school-class, workplace, or community. References: Willem L, Abrams S, Libin JK P, Petrof O, Coletti P, Kuylen E, Møgelmose S, Wambua J, Herzog S A, Faes C, SIMID COVID19 team, Beutels P, Hens N: The impact of contact tracing and household bubbles on deconfinement strategies for COVID-19. Nature Communications 12, 1524 (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21747-7). Libin JK P, Willem L, Verstraeten T, Torneri A, Vanderlocht J, Hens N. Assessing the feasibility and effectiveness of household-pooled universal testing to control COVID-19 epidemics. PLoS Computational Biology 17(3): e1008688 (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008688)