COVID-19 pandemic: Impact of lockdown, contact and non-contact transmissions on infection dynamics

Shovonlal Roy

It is important to highlight that, compared to direct contact exposure, little is known about the impact and relative strength of the indirect route of transmission for COVID-19, due to insufficient data. This constraint imposes uncertainty in predicting and mitigating COVID-19 infection within the boundary of any country. Scientists have further warned that it could take long time to gather sufficient data on this route of infection, which may cost more lives (Nature report). The role of indirect transmission on the infection dynamics, therefore, has been less explored or unexplored in the context of COVID-19 modelling. In other epidemiological models, however, the non-contact route of infection has been explored previously e.g., [7, 8] . Here, non-contact transmission is included in an SEIR model, and its impact is explored in conjunction with mitigation measures. Further details on model equation, parameterisation and simulations methods are given in the appendix.