Transmission dynamics and quarantine control of COVID-19 in cluster community: A new transmission-quarantine model with case study for diamond princess

Abstract

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a zoonotic illness which has spread rapidly and widely since December, 2019, and is identified as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. The pandemic to date has been characterized by ongoing cluster community transmission. Quarantine intervention to prevent and control the transmission are expected to have a substantial impact on delaying the growth and mitigating the size of the epidemic. To our best knowledge, our study is among the initial efforts to analyze the interplay between transmission dynamics and quarantine intervention of the COVID-19 outbreak in a cluster community. In the paper, we propose a novel Transmission-Quarantine epidemiological model by nonlinear ordinary differential equations system. With the use of detailed epidemiologic data from the Cruise ship “Diamond Princess”, we design a Transmission-Quarantine work-flow to determine the optimal case-specific parameters, and validate the proposed model by comparing the simulated curve with the real data. First, we apply a general SEIR-type epidemic model to study the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 without quarantine intervention, and present the analytic and simulation results for the epidemiological parameters such as the basic reproduction number, the maximal scale of infectious cases, the instant number of recovered cases, the popularity level and the final scope of the epidemic of COVID-19. Second, we adopt the proposed Transmission-Quarantine interplay model to predict the varying trend of COVID-19 with quarantine intervention, and compare the transmission dynamics with and without quarantine to illustrate the effectiveness of the quarantine measure, which indicates that with quarantine intervention, the number of infectious cases in 7 days decrease by about 60%, compared with the scenario of no intervention. Finally, we conduct sensitivity analysis to simulate the impacts of different parameters and different quarantine measures, and identify the optimal quarantine strategy that will be used by the decision makers to achieve the maximal protection of population with the minimal interruption of economic and social development.