Modeling Control, Lockdown \& Exit Strategies for COVID-19 Pandemic in India

TL;DR

This paper develops a mathematical SEIR model tailored for India, incorporating social contact patterns and intervention strategies like lockdowns and social distancing, to predict COVID-19 spread and control measures.

Contribution

It introduces a zone-wise lockdown SEIR model specific to India, integrating social contact matrices and asymptomatic transmission to improve prediction accuracy.

Findings

Model accurately predicts COVID-19 trends in India until July 2020.

Lockdown strategies significantly reduce transmission rates.

Asymptomatic individuals play a crucial role in disease spread.

Abstract

COVID-19--a viral infectious disease--has quickly emerged as a global pandemic infecting millions of people with a significant number of deaths across the globe. The symptoms of this disease vary widely. Depending on the symptoms an infected person is broadly classified into two categories namely, asymptomatic and symptomatic. Asymptomatic individuals display mild or no symptoms but continue to transmit the infection to otherwise healthy individuals. This particular aspect of asymptomatic infection poses a major obstacle in managing and controlling the transmission of the infectious disease. In this paper, we attempt to mathematically model the spread of COVID-19 in India under various intervention strategies. We consider SEIR type epidemiological models, incorporated with India specific social contact matrix representing contact structures among different age groups of the population. Impact of various factors such as presence of asymptotic individuals, lockdown strategies, social distancing practices, quarantine, and hospitalization on the disease transmission is extensively studied. Numerical simulation of our model is matched with the real COVID-19 data of India till May 15, 2020 for the purpose of estimating the model parameters. Our model with zone-wise lockdown is seen to give a decent prediction for July 20, 2020.