COVID-19 most vulnerable Mexican cities lack the public health infrastructure to face the pandemic: a new temporally-explicit model

Wesley Dattilo; Alcides Castro e Silva; Roger Guevara; Ian MacGregor-Fors; Servio Pontes Ribeiro

The framework of our model is based on a SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) model and is divided in a metapopulation structure, where 50 focal Mexican cities with airports of national and international category are interconnected by their number of flights. Flights from cities with a high number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 are considered as an additional factor for the spread of the disease in the country, as already described for Brazil (10) . In addition to modeling how the COVID-19 will spread across the Mexican territory over time, we consider of crucial importance to know if Mexican cities are prepared with the required healthcare infrastructure to successfully deal with this pandemic under the simulated scenarios. For this, we also assessed the relevant public healthcare infrastructure of the Mexican cities that show to be most vulnerable to COVID-19 by our model. To do so, we calculated the number of infected patients that will need hospitalization on a daily basis. Finally, since social distancing guidelines are being shown to lower the rate of COVID-19 dispersion in many territories, we have also created scenarios of social distancing to simulate its effect on the number of people infected in Mexico over time.