Modelling fatality curves of COVID-19 and the effectiveness of intervention strategies

Giovani L. Vasconcelos; Antônio M. S. Macêdo; Raydonal Ospina; Francisco A. G. Almeida; Gerson C. Duarte-Filho; Inês C. L. Souza

The response interventions to the pandemic of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID- 19) have varied from country to country. Several countries, specially those first hit by the disease, have adopted a standard progressive protocol, from containment to mitigation to supression [1] . As these strategies failed to deter the spread of the virus, government authorities introduced ever more stringent measures on their citizens' movements in an attempt to suppress or sharply reduce the propagation of the virus. More recently, countries have adopted drastic countermeasures at the very outset of the outbreak. For example, on March 24, 2020, India announced a threeweek total ban on people "venturing out" of their homes [2] , even though there were fewer than 500 confirmed cases and only nine people had died from COVID-19 in a country with a population of 1.3 billion people. One difficulty in deciding the best approach to counter the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) is that the virus propagation dynamics is not yet well understood.