Challenges in control of Covid-19: short doubling time and long delay to effect of interventions

Lorenzo Pellis; Francesca Scarabel; Helena B Stage; Christopher E Overton; Lauren H K Chappell; Katrina A Lythgoe; Elizabeth Fearon; Emma Bennett; Jacob Curran-Sebastian; Rajenki Das; Martyn Fyles; Hugo Lewkowicz; Xiaoxi Pang; Bindu Vekaria; Luke Webb; Thomas A House; Ian Hall

These simple estimates are obtained under the assumption of mass-action mixing. The explicit presence of a social structure (e.g. age-stratification, household/network structure, etc.), which in principle could affect them, is likely negligible in such a high R 0 and growth rate regime [52 ] . The effect of the social structure on transmission is expected to grow in importance (especially the household structure, since isolation and quarantine facilitate within-household transmission) the closer R 0 is to 1. 5 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. 6 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.