Transmission Dynamics of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the World: The Roles of Intervention and Seasonality
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Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading rapidly all over the world. The transmission dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic is still unclear, but developing strategies for mitigating the severity of the pandemic is yet a top priority for global public health. In this study, we developed a novel compartmental model, SEIR-CV(susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed with control variables), which not only considers the key characteristics of asymptomatic infection and the effects of seasonal variations, but also incorporates different control measures for multiple transmission routes, so as to accurately predict and effectively control the spread of COVID-19. Based on SEIR-CV, we predicted the COVID-19 epidemic situation in China out of Hubei province and proposed corresponding control strategies. The results showed that the prediction results are highly consistent with the outbreak surveillance data, which proved that the proposed control strategies have achieved sound consequent in the actual epidemic control. Subsequently, we have conducted a rolling prediction for the United States, Brazil, India, five European countries (the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany, and France), southern hemisphere, northern hemisphere, and the world out of China. The results indicate that control measures and seasonal variations have a great impact on the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our prediction results show that the COVID-19 pandemic is developing more rapidly due to the impact of the cold season in the southern hemisphere countries such as Brazil. While the development of the pandemic should have gradually weakened in the northern hemisphere countries with the arrival of the warm season, instead of still developing rapidly due to the relative loose control measures such as the United States and India. Furthermore, the prediction results illustrate that if keeping the current control measures in the main COVID-19 epidemic countries, the pandemic will not be contained and the situation may eventually turn to group immunization, which would lead to the extremely severe disaster of about 5 billion infections and 300 million deaths globally. However, if China’s super stringent control measures were implemented from 15 July, 15 August or 15 September 2020, the total infections would be contained about 15 million, 32 million or 370 million respectively, which indicates that the stringent and timely control measures is critical, and the best window period is before September for eventually overcoming COVID-19.
Significance
COVID-19 is now posing a huge threat to global public health. The key features such as asymptomatic infection and droplet or airborne transmission make COVID-19 more easily spread and more widely distributed around the world. It is an urgent need to explore the optimal intervention strategies and measures to contain the pandemic. Our novel SEIR-CV compartmental model considers the new features of COVID-19, exhibits the impact of the intervention strategies and seasonal variations, and thus can accurately predicts its trajectory in China and the rest of the world. Our research results suggest that control measures and seasonal variations have a great impact on the development of the COVID-19 pandemic, which can only be contained by stringent strategies during the best window period before September 2020 for eventually overcoming COVID-19, otherwise it would cause a severer global catastrophe.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.17.20156430: (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: 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:The difference may be due to the fact that many infected cases were undetected when there were no or very mild symptoms because of the limitation of the hospital’s admission conditions and diagnosis reagents in the early stage. However, our study indicates that the lockdown of Wuhan city during late January 2020 played a significant role …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.17.20156430: (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: 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:The difference may be due to the fact that many infected cases were undetected when there were no or very mild symptoms because of the limitation of the hospital’s admission conditions and diagnosis reagents in the early stage. However, our study indicates that the lockdown of Wuhan city during late January 2020 played a significant role in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in China and even the world. On one hand, implementation of travel restrictions within the city and shutting down transportation out of the city led to a remarkable decline in the spread of COVID-19 to other regions of China and the rest of the world.45-47 On the other hand, the Wuhan restrictions provide valuable response time and experience for controlling the disease. We see an obvious time lag between the Wuhan and other regions of China, and the rest of the world. Our modeling indicates that the COVID-19 pandemic in the world outside of China is rapidly spreading. Urgent steps need to be taken by countries, particularly those with weak health care systems.48 The situation is really dangerous as the recent Lancet editorial “COVID-19: too little, too late?” published on March 2020 argued, that “countries have done too little, too late to contain the epidemic”.49 Some countries are still taking loose control measures. According to a recent WHO-China joint mission report, China’s measures to control the COVID-19 epidemic are the most “ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history”, av...
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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