Increased Detection coupled with Social Distancing and Health Capacity Planning Reduce the Burden of COVID-19 Cases and Fatalities: A Proof of Concept Study using a Stochastic Computational Simulation Model

Pramit Ghosh; Salah Basheer; Sandip Paul; Partha Chakrabarti; Jit Sarkar

The extent and intensity of social distancing is in the eye of the storm. The disease propagation follows a somewhat fractal pattern, affecting a cluster of close contacts of a case in a locality and later spreads to other regions. Till the clusters coalesce, disease is localised in smaller localities and that is the best opportunity for our ongoing intervention to work. In South Korea almost 2/3 rd of the cases occurred in one particular region of Daegu. While overall incidence is around 19/100000 in the country, Daegu records incidence of 278/100000. Data also shows that only 17% cases were documented as sporadic cases and rest were considered to have occurred in clusters; 50% of that too in one cluster [20] . Hence the spread of the disease is not uniform or homogeneous. Current evidence shows a fall in number of new cases in the recent past in that country. Interestingly, in India also 4 states contribute to about half of all the cases.