Evaluating the different control policies for COVID-19 between mainland China and European countries by a mathematical model in the confirmed cases

Feng Lin; Yi Huang; Huifang Zhang; Xu He; Yonghua Yin; Jiaxin Liu

In January the disease spread very fast in China. According to the information supplied by NHC and the Chinese CDC, the number of confirmed cases was 45 on Jan 16 2020, which increased to more than 80000 on Mar 5 2020. As the increasing rate of the active cases is close to 0 in March, it could be deduced that the epidemic situation is almost under control. However the epidemic situation in European countries was severe in March. As there was a relatively complete process from epidemic outbreak to control in China, it could supply a model by retrospective study. A mathematical model is proposed by modified susceptibleinfected-recovered (SIR) model, which for convenience is named as susceptible-infected-recovered-death (SIRD) model. The determination of parameters relies on case number data provided by the Chinese CDC which updates the number of active cases both in China and the global per day [7] and NHC which mainly updates the number of the active cases, the close contacts and the recovered cases in China [8] . Using the mathematical model proposed by the epidemic situation in China, the epidemic situation in European countries could also be estimated in the same way. The determination of the parameters in European countries relies on the data from Worldometer [6] . In this study 2 European countries Italy and Spain where the epidemic situation is quite severe are chosen .