An SEIR Model with Contact Tracing and Age-Structured Social Mixing for COVID-19 outbreak

Teimouri, A.

In December 2019 a severe acute respiratory syndrome now known as SARS-CoV-2 began to surge in Wuhan, China. The virus soon spread throughout the world to become a pandemic. Since the outbreak various measures were put in place to contain and control the spread, these interventions were mostly based on compartmental models in epidemiology with the main goal of controlling and monitoring the rate of the basic and effective reproduction number. In this paper, we propose an SEIR model where we incorporate contact tracing and age-structured social mixing. We show the explicit relation between contact tracing and social mixing and other relevant parameters of the proposed model. We derive a formula for the effective reproduction number which is expressed in terms of reported cases, tracing quantities and social mixing. We use this formula to determine the expectation value of the effective reproduction number in London, UK.