Containing COVID-19 outbreaks using a Firewall

TL;DR

This paper investigates a novel containment strategy for COVID-19 outbreaks by adding a firewall block to limit spread, demonstrating significant improvements through stochastic modeling and policy adjustments.

Contribution

It introduces a new containment scheme using an additional firewall block and analyzes its effectiveness via a coupled stochastic compartment model.

Findings

Adding a firewall block significantly reduces outbreak spread.

Policy changes like flux adjustments and lockdowns enhance containment.

The model shows robustness across various parameters.

Abstract

COVID-19 outbreaks have proven to be very difficult to isolate and extinguish before they spread out. An important reason behind this might be that epidemiological barriers consisting in stopping symptomatic people are likely to fail because of the contagion time before onset, mild cases and/or asymptomatics carriers. Motivated by these special COVID-19 features, we study a scheme for containing an outbreak in a city that consists in adding an extra firewall block between the outbreak and the rest of the city. We implement a coupled compartment model with stochastic noise to simulate a localized outbreak that is partially isolated and analyze its evolution with and without firewall for different plausible model parameters. We explore how further improvements could be achieved if the epidemic evolution would trigger policy changes for the flux and/or lock-down in the different blocks. Our results show that a substantial improvement is obtained by merely adding an extra block between the outbreak and the bulk of the city.