Mitigating COVID-19 outbreak via high testing capacity and strong transmission-intervention in the United States

Shi Chen; Qin Li; Song Gao; Yuhao Kang; Xun Shi

The interstate travel in the United States has been rapidly dropping recently (39) , which is going to have a tremendous impact on the country's economy and society. However, this study finds that the mitigation effect that this change can bring about by itself, regarding abating the COVID-19 spread, is very limited as the outbreak has already widespread in all states. On the other hand, our modeling indicates that lowering the transmission rate and the unreported-case rate would have a great effect on abating the infection. Mapped to the public policy, this means that curbing the interstates travel alone is not going to reduce the spread of COVID-19, while the policies such as ordering stay-at-home and social distancing that reduces human interaction and increasing the testing capacities of all clinics around the nation could significantly decrease the total number of infections. While we did not conduct a rigorous economic analysis in this study, it seems reasonable to assume that producing more testing kits and conducting more tests will be significantly less expensive than completely shutting off business and curbing travels. result. By decreasing α r from 1 to 0, we increase the report rate from the original r 0 to 1, and by decreasing α b we decrease the transmission rate. Most states, except a few such as NY, MI, and CA, see drastic improvement when the transmission rate is decreased and the testing(reporting) rate is increased, but the reduction of interstate traffic alone is not as effective. Our modelling reveals that once the epidemic in an area has reached a certain stage, the difference that can be caused to the local situation by the relatively small number of imported cases due to the interstate travel is insignificant. According to our modeling, all states in the United States have reached that stage. Therefore, as long as those travelers follow the social-distancing rules and the local government provides sufficient testing capacity, there is no apparent urge to curb interstate travel. This is in line with the finding in (20, 36) CC-BY-NC 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.