A first study on the impact of current and future control measures on the spread of COVID-19 in Germany

Maria Vittoria Barbarossa; Jan Fuhrmann; Julian Heidecke; Hridya Vinod Varma; Noemi Castelletti; Jan H Meinke; Stefan Krieg; Thomas Lippert

The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20056630 doi: medRxiv preprint Among the simulated scenarios (Fig. 5) , the most coherent predictions are the effectiveness of enhanced testing (T1, T1+) and particular care toward endangered persons (IO, IO-) for the reduction of the predicted number of fatalities. The expansion of testing capacities by a factor of 10 alone already results in a reduction of fatalities by about 50% as compared to the baseline (result not shown in figures). Clearly, increased testing will result in a higher number of diagnosed cases, increasing the peak number of known infectives by a factor of two (Fig. 6b, Fig. 6c ), but it is important to keep in mind that the additional identified cases should be expected to be mostly weakly symptomatic. The expected peak number of patients requiring hospitalization is reduced by more than 30%, and the same is true for patients requiring intensive care (result not shown in figures).