A Divide and Conquer Strategy against the Covid-19 Pandemic?!

  1. Patrick Mangat

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Abstract

The concern about (socio-)economic consequences of collective lockdowns in the Covid-19 pandemic calls for alternative strategies. We consider a divide and conquer strategy in which a high risk group (HRG) is put on strict isolation, whereas the remainder of the population is exposed to the virus, building up immunity against Covid-19. The question is whether this strategy may suppress the effective reproduction number below the critical value of without further lockdown once the HRG is released from isolation. While this proposal appears already rather academic, we show that can only be obtained provided that the HRG is less than ~ 20 − 30% of the total population. Hence, this strategy is likely to fail in countries with a HRG larger than the given upper bound. In addition, we argue that the maximum infection rate occurring in this strategy is likely to exceed realistic capacities of most health care systems. While the conclusion is rather negative in this regard, we emphasise that the strategy of stopping the curve at an early stage of the Covid-19 pandemic has a chance to work out. The required duration of the lockdown is estimated to be τ ~ 14 days/ (up to some order one factor) for , provided a systematic tracing strategy of new infections exists for the subsequent relaxation phase. In this context we also argue why remains the crucial parameter which needs to be accurately monitored and controlled.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.05.20092155: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    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 10.1101/2020.05.05.20092155v1 on medRxiv