Feasibility Study of Mitigation and Suppression Intervention Strategies for Controlling COVID-19 Outbreaks in London and Wuhan

Po Yang; Jun Qi; Shuhao Zhang; Xulong Wang; Gaoshan Bi; Yun Yang; Bin Sheng

The first stage is initial parameters estimation using COVID-19 data from four cases: Hubei, Wuhan, UK and London. In this stage, a preliminary qualitative assessment of each case is performed, by comparing their similarity and dissimilarity on area, transportation, population density, migration flows, date of the first confirmed case, etc. We would determine value of initial parameters in the SEMCR including N, Mt, and date of the first confirmed case. Notably, in Wuhan, the date of the first confirmed case is not officially released. The work [8] estimates the first confirmed case is by the end of Nov 2019; and Zhong [11] points out the first confirmed case in Wuhan is on 23 nd December 2019. Here, we take the same settings of first confirmed case on 23 nd December 2019. The next step is to estimate and normalize other parameters in the model. Assuming that COVID-19 has similar transmission ratio and incubation rate in all four cases, we use parameter values fitted from [11] , where incubation rate is 1/7; the rate of transmission for the I to S is 0.157; the rate of transmission for the E to S is 0.787. As for estimation of other parameters, we follow the COVID-19 official report from WHO [15] , including the proportion of Mild, Severe and Critical cases, the probability of death, etc.