Modeling the COVID-19 outbreaks and the effectiveness of the containment measures adopted across countries

Edward De Brouwer; Daniele Raimondi; Yves Moreau

The undefined ω bins can then be inferred by multiplying their α with the total number of cases N it . The resulting distribution of cases per age is presented on Figure 5 in red. Analysis of the healthcare system strain-level during the epidemic progression. The COVID-19 pandemic has been putting immense pressure on the healthcare systems of many countries because it spreads widely in the population in an asymptomatic or mild form (4), but a significant percentage of the symptomatic cases (6-11% in Italy (6, 7)) requires ICU treatment, which is a limited resource in any country, including European countries (8) . The availability of ICU beds is crucial (9) because so far there is no established curative treatment for COVID-19 and the clinical best practice is to put patients suffering from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome under respiratory support, for a period that may last up to two weeks (6) . Saturation of ICU capacity causes a dramatic decrease of the quality of the medical treatments provided to patients, thereby worsening the observed Case Fatality Rate (CFR) (6, 9) .