Abstract
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a worldwide pandemic that has been affecting Portugal since 2 March 2020. The Portuguese government has been making efforts to contradict the exponential growth through social isolation measures. We have developed a mathematical model to predict the impact of such measures in the number of infected cases and peak of infection. We estimate the peak to be around 2 million infected cases by the beginning of May if no additional measures are taken. The model shows that current measures effectively isolated 25-30% of the population, contributing to some reduction on the infection peak. Importantly, our simulations show that the infection burden can be further reduced with higher isolation degree, providing information for a second intervention.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is already considered a world pandemic which is starting to have dramatic effects in Europe, where, as of 27 of March, 265,421 cases have been reported[1,2]
Simulation of the first 18 days with our model was able to describe the exponential increase of the number of confirmed cases reported by the DGS between 2 and 18 March 2020 (Figure 1)
The evolution of the number of cases reported by DGS between 18 and 25 March fit between the simulation curves corresponding to 20% and 30% population isolation
Summary
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is already considered a world pandemic which is starting to have dramatic effects in Europe, where, as of 27 of March, 265,421 cases have been reported[1,2]. The Portuguese government together with the National Health Directorate (DGS) declared a state of emergency and adopted interventive populational measures (IM) on 18 March 2020 in an attempt to drop the peak of infections even if at the cost of prolonging the infection time. These measures are based on the isolation of people at home, social distancing and adopting protective antiseptic policies. Most forecasting models are based on the number of cases reported and do not take into account the effects of these government-imposed measures and behavioral change How these measures impact the evolution of the COVID-19 infection and can prevent the expansion of the epidemic is unknown. We provide a simple SI model that describe the dynamics of transition of COVID-19 in Portugal during the first 21 days and predicts the impact of isolation measures towards the expected peak of infection
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