2020/04/11 by Andreas Bossert, Moritz Kersting, Bossert, Andreas +11
Mathematics · #COVID-19 epidemiological studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2004.05513
COVID-19 has spread from China across Europe and the United States and has\nbecome a global pandemic. In countries of the Global South, due to often weaker\nsocioeconomic options and health care systems, effective local countermeasures\nremain debated. We combine large-scale socioeconomic and traffic survey data\nwith detailed agent-based simulations of local transportation to analyze\nCOVID-19 spreading in a regional model for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality\nin South Africa under a range of countermeasure scenarios. The simulations\nindicate that any realistic containment strategy, including those similar to\nthe one ongoing in South Africa, may yield a manifold overload of available\nintensive care units (ICUs). Only immediate and the most severe\ncountermeasures, up to a complete lock-down that essentially inhibits all joint\nhuman activities, can contain the epidemic effectively.\n As South Africa exhibits rather favorable conditions compared to many other\ncountries of the Global South, our findings constitute rough conservative\nestimates and may support identifying strategies towards containing COVID-19 as\nwell as any major future pandemics in these countries.\n