Modeling the COVID-19 outbreaks and the effectiveness of the containment measures adopted across countries
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Abstract
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak, originally started in China, a global pandemic. Since then, the outbreak has indeed spread across all continents, threatening the public health of numerous countries. Although the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of COVID-19 is relatively low when optimal level of healthcare is granted to the patients, the high percentage of severe cases developing severe pneumonia and thus requiring respiratory support is worryingly high, and could lead to a rapid saturation of Intensive Care Units (ICUs). To overcome this risk, most countries enacted COVID-19 containment measures. In this study, we use a Bayesian SEIR epidemiological model to perform a parametric regression over the COVID-19 outbreaks data in China, Italy, Belgium, and Spain, and estimate the effect of the containment measures on the basic reproduction ratio R 0 .
We find that the effect of these measures is detectable, but tends to be gradual, and that a progressive strengthening of these measures usually reduces the R 0 below 1, granting a decay of the outbreak. We also discuss the biases and inconsistencies present in the publicly available data on COVID-19 cases, providing an estimate for the actual number of cases in Italy on March 12, 2020. Lastly, despite the data and model’s limitations, we argue that the idea of “flattening the curve” to reach herd immunity is likely to be unfeasible.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.02.20046375: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are however some limitations to this analysis. While South Korea’s testing strategy has clearly been comprehensive, it is not clear that it has been completely un-biased. In particular, the low number of cases in the 10-19 years bin compared to the 20-29 years bin might be explained by a radical difference in the true proportion of cases between those two age groups, but also by lower testing among younger individuals because …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.02.20046375: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.Table 2: Resources
No key resources detected.
Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.
Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:There are however some limitations to this analysis. While South Korea’s testing strategy has clearly been comprehensive, it is not clear that it has been completely un-biased. In particular, the low number of cases in the 10-19 years bin compared to the 20-29 years bin might be explained by a radical difference in the true proportion of cases between those two age groups, but also by lower testing among younger individuals because they might have been considered at very low risk of complications and/or unlikely to be infectious. The information available does not allow us to discriminate between those explanations. Moreover, the assumption that the case fatality rate in South Korea and (north) Italy is identical is subject to discussion as physicians in South Korea are more experienced in managing patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome following the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) epidemic in South Korea. Moreover, every country adopted its own specific strategy for testing and reporting of cases, resulting in heterogeneity of the COVID-19 data coming from different countries. For example, South Korea opted for blanket testing of its population and selective quarantine of the positive cases, while Italy focused on testing high-risk and symptomatic subjects and generalized lockdown of the country to reduce the R0 by acting on the frequency of social contacts. Even within the same country, the reporting strategy changed over time in some cases...
Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.
Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.
Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.
Results from rtransparent:- Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
- No funding statement was detected.
- No protocol registration statement was detected.
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