Fundamental principles of epidemic spread highlight the immediate need for large-scale serological surveys to assess the stage of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic

Jose Lourenco; Robert Paton; Mahan Ghafari; Moritz Kraemer; Craig Thompson; Peter Simmonds; Paul Klenerman; Sunetra Gupta

Here, we calibrate a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model to data on cumulative reported SARS-CoV-2 associated deaths from the United Kingdom (UK) and Italy under the assumption that such deaths are well reported events that occur only in a vulnerable fraction of the population. We focus on model solutions which take into consideration previous estimates of critical epidemiological parameters such as the basic reproduction number (R 0 ), probability of death in the vulnerable fraction of the population, infectious period and time from infection to death, with the intention of exploring the sensitivity of the system to the actual fraction of the population vulnerable to severe disease and death.