Suppress, and Not Just Flatten: Strategies for Rapid Suppression of COVID19 Transmission in Small World Communities

Abstract

Many countries have introduced Lockdowns to contain the COVID19 epidemic. Lockdowns, though an effective policy for containment, imposes a heavy cost on the economy as it enforces extreme social distancing measures on the whole population. The objective of this note is to study alternatives to Lockdown which are either more targeted or allows partial opening of the economy. Cities are often spatially organized into wards. We introduce Multi-lattice small world (MLSW) network as a model of a city where each ward is represented by a 2D lattice and each vertex in the latex represents an agent endowed with SEIR dynamics. Through simulation studies on MLSW, we examine a variety of candidate suppression policies and find that restricting Lockdowns to infected wards can indeed out-perform global Lockdowns in both reducing the attack rate and also shortening the duration of the epidemic. Even policies such as partial opening of the economy, such as Two-Day Work Week, can be competitive if augmented with extensive Contact Tracing.

Epidemic dynamics in census-calibrated modular contact network

“…It is important to note that temptation to introduce realism in the wire-frame to understand and explain epidemic dynamics in the real world may incur higher computational costs (Xia et al. 2015 ; Bhattacharyya and Vinay 2020 ). Such parameter-intensive models are more prone to errors and may produce results contrary to expectations.…”

“… 2020 ) l Latency period 3-5 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) t Symptom development period 2-3 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) pi Period of infectivity 7 days (Cevik et al. 2021 ) Hospitalization period 3-7 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) Recovery period of asymptomatic individual 7-10 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) Recovery period of symptomatic individual 9-16 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) Recovery period of hospitalized individual 9-16 days (Venkateswaran and Damani 2020 ) d Mortality rate of hospitalized individual 0.15 (Bhattacharyya and Vinay 2020 ) Days of hospitalization for deceased individual 1-20 days (Bhattacharyya and Vinay 2020 ) …”

“…Our framework extends the small-sized city network proposed by Bhattacharyya and Vinay ( 2020 ) by fortifying the network with interaction patterns commensurate with the local demography of the population. Specific contributions to the research are listed below.…”

“… 2014 ; Liu et al. 2015 ; Bhattacharyya and Vinay 2020 ). Most of these works study epidemic dynamics on a small-sized network consisting of a few modules (Hui and Zi-You 2007 ; Saumell-Mendiola et al.…”

A new SEIAR model on small-world networks to assess the intervention measures in the COVID-19 pandemics

“…Next, we explore how the timing of the isolating measures affects the epidemic’s spread and the effect of isolating infected communities by designing a method to simulate the Lockdowns of the infected wards at different periods. As strict measures need to pay substantial economic costs, Bhattacharyya and Vinay [34] explore more cost-efficient measures to encountering pandemics and find that isolating infected wards can outperform global Lockdowns. The reason is that isolating infected community can fundamentally reduce the spread of the virus quickly with low controlling cost.…”