Book Description

A novel coronavirus (COVID-19) has affected more than 200 countries across the globe. It emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 and has been declared as a global pandemic by WHO. There are more than 20.2 million confirmed cases and 739 thousand deaths of the COVID-19 all around the world as of Aug 11, 2020. Each country has taken unprecedented measures in response to this outbreak. In this research we aim to estimate the effects of physical lockdown measure on the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic and how relaxation of this intervention affects the number of cases over time. We simulate the ongoing trajectory of an outbreak in four countries namely China, Italy, US, and Russia, using the susceptible - exposed - infected - critical - recovered - dead (SEICRD) model. We perform an extensive numerical study to assess the implication of different strategies and spread scenarios. Our projections show that the date lock-down starts, its duration, and proper implementation significantly impact the trajectory of the outbreak. We observe that 10 days delay in the lock-down may cause dramatic increase in the number of both infected and deceased cases. We also note that easing of the lockdown intervention before the number of cases decrease sufficiently may cause the second wave earlier than expected. Our findings indicate that the second wave has already started in US and the number of deaths are projected to be substantially higher than the first wave and will peak in late December, assuming that virus spread and fatality characteristics do not change.