Abstract
Once an epidemic outbreak has been effectively contained through non-pharmaceutical interventions, a safe protocol is required for the subsequent release of social distancing restrictions to prevent a disastrous resurgence of the infection. We report individual-based numerical simulations of stochastic susceptible-infectious-recovered model variants on four distinct spatially organized lattice and network architectures wherein contact and mobility constraints are implemented. We robustly find that the intensity and spatial spread of the epidemic recurrence wave can be limited to a manageable extent provided release of these restrictions is delayed sufficiently (for a duration of at least thrice the time until the peak of the unmitigated outbreak) and long-distance connections are maintained on a low level (limited to less than five percent of the overall connectivity).
Highlights
Once an epidemic outbreak has been effectively contained through non-pharmaceutical interventions, a safe protocol is required for the subsequent release of social distancing restrictions to prevent a disastrous resurgence of the infection
Any infected individual spontaneously recovers to an immune state with fixed rate a : I → R . (Details of the simulation algorithm are presented in the Supplementary Materials.) For the recovery period, we choose 1/a ∼= 6.667 days (1 day is equivalent to one Monte Carlo step, MCS) informed by known COVID-19 characteristics[13]
We compare salient features of the inevitable epidemic resurgence subsequent to the elimination of social distancing restrictions, namely the asymptotic fraction R∞/N of recovered individuals, i.e., the integrated number of infected individuals; and the time τ (T) that elapses between the release and the peak of the second infection wave, both as function of the mitigation duration T. We find that the latter grows exponentially with T on both dynamical lattice architectures, but only linearly on the static networks (Fig. 6B)
Summary
Once an epidemic outbreak has been effectively contained through non-pharmaceutical interventions, a safe protocol is required for the subsequent release of social distancing restrictions to prevent a disastrous resurgence of the infection. To determine the robustness of our results and compare the influence of different contact characteristics, we ran our stochastic model on four distinct spatially structured architectures, namely i) regular two-dimensional square lattices, wherein individuals move slowly and with limited range, i.e., spread diffusively; ii) two-dimensional small-world networks that in addition incorporate substantial long-distance interactions and contaminations; and on iii) random as well as iv) scale-free social contact networks.
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