Feasibility Study of Mitigation and Suppression Intervention Strategies for Controlling COVID-19 Outbreaks in London and Wuhan

Po Yang; Jun Qi; Shuhao Zhang; Xulong Wang; Gaoshan Bi; Yun Yang; Bin Sheng

Targeting at this problem, this paper conducts a feasibility study that analyses and compares mitigation and suppression intervention strategies for controlling COVID-19 outbreaks in Wuhan and London. As shown in Fig.1 with Wuhan as a simulated case using data from [6] , we demonstrated performance of taking different intervention strategies: a) No interventions: the peak of daily infections would be up to 2.1 million, but will be completed in 150 days. The epidemics lasts a relatively shorter period of 140 -150 days, but lead to more death. b) Contain phase: taking 90% effectiveness of surveillance and isolation from the 2 nd day of confirmed case potentially enables controlling a new outbreak of COVID-19, but it needs to be maintained over 300 days. c). Suppression intervention from the 32 nd day: the peak of daily infections greatly reduced to 16 thousand, but it had to be followed at least 200 days. Nearly 3 months suppression may potentially lead to economic loss even crisis. d). Mitigation intervention from the 32 nd day: the peak of daily infectious populations increased to 27.7 thousand, but the period of maintenance extended to 150 days. It implied there would be growing death but less economic loss compared to suppression. e). Hybrid intervention of taking both suppression and intervention every 2 weeks: the epidemics of COVID-19 appeared a long-term multimodal trend where the peaks of daily infectious populations were within a range of 40-60 thousand. This might lead to less daily critical cases and offer more time to hospital for releasing their resources.