Optimal COVID-19 epidemic control until vaccine deployment

Ramses Djidjou-Demasse; Yannis Michalakis; Marc Choisy; Micea T. Sofonea; Samuel Alizon

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . that in the time necessary for vaccine development, the standard of treatment of COVID-19 infections remains constant. In reality, the time to discover and implement a new treatment could be lower than the time to discover and deploy a vaccine. This would not affect the general picture because the epidemic threat will remain unless the herd immunity threshold is reached. However, it would greatly affect our disease-induced mortality function and therefore the optimal strategy itself. Nevertheless, this same model remains valid in the context of treatment discovery if we redefine the time interval as the time necessary to set-up such a treatment. Qualitatively, we anticipate our results to hold on a shorter time interval.