Modeling and understanding social isolation in the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

In December 2019, an outbreak that began in the city of Wuhan, China, sparked what would become a pandemic characterized by an infectious disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. Already at the beginning of 2020, the scientific community had been involved, along with political decisions, in a profound and protagonistic way in the development of measures to combat and contain the evolution of the pandemic. Among the issues discussed, social distancing gained prominence due to the uncertainty between the effectiveness and the economic and social impact generated by its implementation. In this work, we evaluated some epidemiological models that emerged because of the need to insert social distancing in the evolution of the number of infected. We discuss how such models help in understanding social isolation as a combat measure and conclude that such measures, when expressive, can help reduce the number of infections, especially when implemented at the beginning of the epidemic due to the low geographical spread.