Controlling epidemic diseases based only on social distancing level

TL;DR

This paper proposes a simple control law that adjusts social distancing levels to keep COVID-19 infections below a target, with stability analysis and simulations demonstrating its effectiveness.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, easy-to-implement control law for epidemic management based solely on social distancing levels, including stability analysis and practical update methods.

Findings

Control law effectively maintains infection levels below target

Stability of the control law is analytically proven

Numerical simulations confirm practical applicability

Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic on March 11, 2020. To the COVID-19 outbreak, there is no vaccination and no treatment. The only way to control the COVID-19 outbreak is sustained physical distancing. In this work, a simple control law was proposed to keep the infected individuals during the COVID-19 outbreak below the desired number. The proposed control law keeps the value of infected individuals controlled only adjusting the social distancing level. The stability analysis of the proposed control law is done and the uncertainties in the parameters were considered. A version of the proposed controller to daily update was developed. This is a very simple approach to the developed control law and can be calculated in a spreadsheet. In the end, numerical simulations were done to show the behavior of the number of infected individuals during an epidemic disease when the proposed control law is used to adjust the social distancing level.