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

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

such reductions can be triggered adaptively, if relevant figures (such as death rates, need for ICU, etc.) exceed a threshold. With additional hygienic measures the situation can be enhanced further. However, we can expect that this situation (repetitive short term lockdowns and hygienic measures) needs to be in place for the next two or three years until herd immunity can be obtained (if vaccination is not available before). • The effects of antibody tests would add significant benefit in order to exclude people with antibodies from the contact reductions. Results show that already a moderate infrastructure for antibody tests (50K per day for Germany) would lead to significant improvements bringing ca. 4.4M people back to public life compared to scenarios without such possibilities. With a higher test capacity (e.g., 100K) this number could be pushed to more than 5.4M. Digital tracing could improve the efficiency of AB tests. If immunity will be lost after some time, AB testing would become even more important. • Seasonality of the disease and general immunization would lead to significant mitigation effects while still requiring the described mechanisms. • A contact index to condense the social contact abilities for all people has been defined, it can illustrate well the effect of the combination of all measures.