Modelling the Spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 in Presence of the Lockdown and Quarantine Measures by a "Kinetic-Type Reactions" Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a kinetic-type reaction model for COVID-19 spread that incorporates lockdown, quarantine, and time delays, successfully fitting data from Belgium, France, and Germany, and predicting second infection waves.

Contribution

It develops a novel kinetic reaction-based model for COVID-19 dynamics that accounts for hospital effects and delays, validated with real European data.

Findings

Model accurately fits COVID-19 data from Belgium, France, and Germany.

Predicts the occurrence of second infection waves.

Provides a framework for understanding lockdown and quarantine effects.

Abstract

We propose a realistic model for the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic subject to the lockdown and quarantine measures, which takes into account the time-delay for recovery or death processes. The dynamic equations for the entire process are derived by adopting a kinetic-type reaction approach. More specifically, the lockdown and the quarantine measures are modelled by some kind of inhibitor reactions where susceptible and infected individuals can be trapped into inactive states. The dynamics for the recovered people is obtained by accounting people who are only traced back to hospitalised infected people. To get the evolution equation we take inspiration from the Michaelis- Menten enzyme-substrate reaction model (the so-called MM reaction) where the enzyme is associated to the available hospital beds, the substrate to the infected people, and the product to the recovered people, respectively. In other words, everything happens as if the hospitals beds act as a catalyser in the hospital recovery process. Of course, in our case the reverse MM reactions has no sense in our case and, consequently, the kinetic constant is equal to zero. Finally, the O.D.E.s for people tested positive to COVID-19 is simply modelled by the following kinetic scheme S+I=>2I with I=>R or I=>D, with S, I, R, and D denoting the compartments Susceptible, Infected, Recovered, and Deceased people, respectively. The resulting kinetic-type equation} provide the O.D.E.s, for elementary reaction steps, describing the number of the infected people, the total number of the recovered people previously hospitalised, subject to the lockdown and the quarantine measure, and the total number of deaths. The model foresees also the second wave of Infection by Coronavirus. The tests carried out on real data for Belgium, France and Germany confirmed the correctness of our model.