Explaining the Bomb-Like Dynamics of COVID-19 with Modeling and the Implications for Policy

Gary Lin; Alexandra T Strauss; Maxwell Pinz; Diego A Martinez; Katie K Tseng; Emily Schueller; Oliver Gatalo; Yupeng Yang; Simon A Levin; Eili Y Klein

As COVID-19 spreads through the United States, questions remain as to the rate of disease spread, the extent of people infected, and the implications for policies regarding quarantines. We conducted this analysis to contribute to available disease models, which play an integral role in defining the policy choices of government officials. Accurate evidence that conforms to observed data is needed to aid those decisions. Our results suggest that there appear to be two dichotomies. The first assumes that most cases are discovered and the R0 of the disease is more than 8. The second assumes a lower R0, but a large fraction of the population is asymptomatically infected and excluded from official estimates of the disease spread. Given these scenarios, we . CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.