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

Having intervened in SD and hospital bed capacity, we next tested whether increasing the rate of case detection followed by immediate quarantine had any effect on reducing the peak prevalence. The peak prevalence is drastically reduced on increasing the detection rate by 3 times and further reduced if increased by 5 times ( Figure 4A ). The reduction in peak prevalence of the Fatal (F) compartment was also similar ( Figure 4B ). Continuous SD for 5 weeks with a detection rate of 1/5 (1 out of 5 cases daily gets detected and quarantined) has an enormous effect on reducing peak prevalence and also provides enough time window for healthcare capacity building for the upcoming burden of hospitalization. However, such prolonged lock-down would have a significant negative impact on the economy as well as mental wellbeing. Considering this, we finally tested whether a continuous SD for 5 weeks or SD for 6 weeks with a gap of 1 week is more effective in reducing the burden of cases. Here we saw that the later approach of SD for 3 weeks followed by a release of 1 week and reintroducing SD for 3 weeks again reduced the peak prevalence of Infectious cases by less than a half compared to the baseline model ( Figure 4A ). This intervention not only reduced the peak burden of both I and F compartment but also delayed it.