Evaluation of the potential incidence of COVID-19 and effectiveness of contention measures in Spain: a data-driven approach

Alberto Aleta; Yamir Moreno

Our model allows to implement and quantify the impact of several conventional measures in Spain. These policies are mostly aimed at reducing the mobility of individuals, but we also include other plausible settings like a reduction in the time for case detection and isolation. Our findings agree with previous results in the literature that have reported that a reduction as large as 90% in traffic flow has a limited effect on the spreading of the disease. Important enough and at variance with such studies, the data-driven nature of this study and the available dataset allowed us to disentangle the impact of each transportation mode in several scenarios of mobility reduction in Spain. We found that while shutting down completely any transportation means does not lead to a significant reduction in the incidence of the disease, in some contexts the arrival of the peak of the disease is delayed by several days, which could eventually be advantageous. Altogether, we provide evidences supporting the adoption of a mixed strategy that combines some mobility restrictions with, mainly, the early identification of infected individuals and their isolation. These conclusions agree with the latest recommendations by the WHO [10]. We also highlight that although this study has been made with data from Spain, our findings can also be valid for any other country given the ubiquity of mobility patterns worldwide.