Modeling Exit Strategies from COVID-19 Lockdown with a Focus on Antibody Tests

Reinhard German; Anatoli Djanatliev; Lisa Maile; Peter Bazan; Holger Hackstein

We use these insights to find an exit strategy which does not overload the health system, specifically ICU capacity. Contact reductions, as in the first lockdown, are triggered, if the current ICU occupation exceeds a certain threshold. Such additional adaptive restrictions periods should be short-term and can be released when the number falls below the threshold, however, in order to avoid oscillations, a minimum of two weeks for such reductions is assumed. This can easily be changed to other values or other indicators such as the number of deaths per day. This behavior can be directly transferred to reality by monitoring the utilization of the available ICU capacity and apply interventions if this number exceeds or falls below a certain threshold. Due to the delay when interventions affect the number of infections, we need to apply a threshold of 18.5K to ensure that the ICU capacity is not exceeded. The progression of the disease and the necessary interventions are illustrated in Fig. 8 . As we can see, the model predicts that 9 additional intervals with contact restrictions would be necessary. The last intervention would end in March 2023 and also all hygienic 9 https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html 9 . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.