Mechanistic modelling of COVID-19 and the impact of lockdowns on a short-time scale.
<h4>Background</h4>To mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, some countries have adopted more stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions in contrast to those widely used. In addition to standard practices such as enforcing curfews, social distancing, and closure of non-essentia...
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| Autores principales: | , , , , |
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| Formato: | article |
| Lenguaje: | EN |
| Publicado: |
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
2021
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | https://doaj.org/article/cc19b0cb75914124889f1603a8069a2c |
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| Sumario: | <h4>Background</h4>To mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, some countries have adopted more stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions in contrast to those widely used. In addition to standard practices such as enforcing curfews, social distancing, and closure of non-essential service industries, other non-conventional policies also have been implemented, such as the total lockdown of fragmented regions, which are composed of sparsely and highly populated areas.<h4>Methods</h4>In this paper, we model the movement of a host population using a mechanistic approach based on random walks, which are either diffusive or super-diffusive. Infections are realised through a contact process, whereby a susceptible host is infected if in close spatial proximity of the infectious host with an assigned transmission probability. Our focus is on a short-time scale (∼ 3 days), which is the average time lag time before an infected individual becomes infectious.<h4>Results</h4>We find that the level of infection remains approximately constant with an increase in population diffusion, and also in the case of faster population dispersal (super-diffusion). Moreover, we demonstrate how the efficacy of imposing a lockdown depends heavily on how susceptible and infectious individuals are distributed over space.<h4>Conclusion</h4>Our results indicate that on a short-time scale, the type of movement behaviour does not play an important role in rising infection levels. Also, lock-down restrictions are ineffective if the population distribution is homogeneous. However, in the case of a heterogeneous population, lockdowns are effective if a large proportion of infectious carriers are distributed in sparsely populated sub-regions. |
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