Mitigation and herd immunity strategy for COVID-19 is likely to fail

Wolfgang Bock; Barbara Adamik; Marek Bawiec; Viktor Bezborodov; Marcin Bodych; Jan Pablo Burgard; Thomas Goetz; Tyll Krueger; Agata Migalska; Barbara Pabjan; Tomasz Ozanski; Ewaryst Rafajlowicz; Wojciech Rafajlowicz,; Ewa Skubalska-Rafajlowicz; Sara Ryfczynska; Ewa Szczurek; Piotr Szymanski

vere progression is in turn more probable for older infected individuals. The outside household contact structure was intentionally chosen to be simple in order to have only one relevant and easily interpretable parameter in the model. We do not consider super-spreading events that could enhance the progression of the epidemic. Such events might have a strong impact at the beginning of an epidemic outbreak but, as the number of cases increases, the mean number of secondary infections R will dominate the evolution. Testing and quarantine: For Wroc law we included additional model features to study the effect of testing followed by household quarantine in case the testing was positive. We assume that individuals with severe symptoms will always be detected and individuals with mild symptoms will be detected with probability q two days after the onset of symptoms. A detection is followed up by quarantine of the corresponding household with the effect that all out-household contacts by members of those households are stopped. The parameter q can be interpreted as the likelihood that a person with characteristic mild symptoms will be tested for COVID-19. We did not consider the effect of backtracking in this article since it is a prevention strategy mainly applied during the early and final phases of the epidemic. Table 2 : Intervals of R min ≤ R * ≤ R max for a possible successful overcritical mitigation. Table 2 shows the intervals of R min ≤ R * ≤ R max which contain the inteval in which a successful overcritical mitigation is possible for both countries 6 . CC-BY-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.