The focus and timing of COVID-19 pandemic control measures under healthcare resource constraints

  1. Chen Wei
  2. Zhengyang Wang
  3. Zhichao Liang
  4. Quanying Liu

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Abstract

Generalizing COVID-19 control strategies in one community to others is confounded by community’s unique demographic and socioeconomic attributes. Here we propose a tailored dynamic model accounting for community-specific transmission controls and medical resource availability. We trained the model using data from Wuhan and applied it to other countries. We show that isolating suspected cases is most effective in reducing transmission rate if the intervention starts early. Having more hospital beds provides leverage that diminishes with delayed intervention onset. The importance of transmission control in turn increases by 65% with a 7-day delay. Furthermore, prolonging outbreak duration by applying an intermediate, rather than strict, transmission control would not prevent hospital overload regardless of bed capacity, and would likely result in a high ratio (21% ∼ 84%) of the population being infected but not treated. The model could help different countries design control policies and gauge the severity of suppression failure.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.16.20067611: (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

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    A dual simulated annealing procedure is performed with 10,000 iterations using the Scipy package31 in Python.
    Scipy
    suggested: (SciPy, RRID:SCR_008058)
    Python
    suggested: (IPython, RRID:SCR_001658)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Another caveat to the current study is that we neglected the inter-community traffic in the model, rendering the model most fitting to apply on a community on total lockdown. At the city level, discussions have started regarding locking down certain hot spots. At the country level, many have closed their borders to non-citizens. As the number of internationally imported cases grew, China announced that it would follow suit starting on March 28, 2020. Partial inter-city traffic reduction only has been estimated to be not effective in preventing inter-community spread5,21, thus the impact of travel on epidemic development through increasing both numbers of susceptible and infectious individuals would need to be carefully evaluated for future decision-making when reassessing lockdowns.

    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.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.16.20067611v1 on medRxiv