COVID-19 spreading under containment actions

TL;DR

This paper models COVID-19 spread in a city considering individual mobility and evaluates three confinement strategies, finding local containment based on health status effectively reduces outbreaks, especially with asymptomatic cases.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed epidemiological model incorporating mobility networks and compares the effectiveness of global, partial, and localized confinement strategies.

Findings

Global confinement prevents massive outbreaks.

Partial restrictions may fail without additional sanitary measures.

Localized confinement effectively reduces disease spread.

Abstract

We propose an epidemiological model that includes the mobility patterns of the individuals, in the spirit to those considered in (Barmak, 2011, 2016) and (Medus, 2011). We assume that people move around in a city of 120x120 blocks with 300 inhabitants in each block. The mobility pattern is associated to a complex network in which nodes represent blocks while the links represent the traveling path of the individuals. We implemented three confinement strategies in order to mitigate the disease spreading: 1) global confinement, 2) partial restriction to mobility, and 3) localized confinement. In the first case, it was observed that a global isolation policy prevents the massive outbreak of the disease. In the second case, a partial restriction to mobility could lead to a massive contagion if this was not complemented with sanitary measures such as the use of masks and social distancing. Finally, a local isolation policy was proposed, conditioned to the health status of each block. It was observed that this mitigation strategy was able to contain and even reduce the outbreak of the disease by intervening in specific regions of the city according to their level of contagion. It was also observed that this strategy is capable of controlling the epidemic in the case that a certain proportion of those infected are asymptomatic.