Lockdowns to Contain COVID-19 Increase Risk and Severity of Mosquito-Borne Disease Outbreaks

Akshay Jindal; Shrisha Rao

The model was previously tuned to only support chikungunya infection. We extended the model to support two additional prevalent mosquito-borne diseases: dengue and malaria. For modeling dengue and malaria epidemics, the parameters for infection and mosquito life-cycle, and infection transmission probabilities were adjusted accordingly. The altered parameters are summarized in Table 2 . It should be noted that the dengue virus can also be passed from human to mosquito in its late intrinsic incubation stage, plus early recovery stage [11] . The existing SEIR model was modified to support this possibility. As seen in Table 2 , the mosquito activity period also varies across diseases. This is because chikungunya and dengue share the same mosquito vector Aedes Aegypti, which usually operates during the day, in contrast to malaria, which is spread by night-biting Anopheles mosquitoes. We presume that 30% of the working human population works during the night instead of the day (as night-shift workers and the like).