Prediction of the COVID-19 outbreak based on a realistic stochastic model

Yuan Zhang; Chong You; Zhenghao Cai; Jiarui Sun; Wenjie Hu; Xiao-Hua Zhou

Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of the current medical tracking policy with a hypothetical controlled test as follows: while keeping the other parameters we estimated unchanged, we set the traceable ratio q = 0 to represent the scenario where no medical tracking were implemented, and let the system evolve. Under this setting, the epidemic would still be contained, see Figure 7 for details, due to the contact control measures that reduce the values of λ's and the reduction of diagnosis waiting time. However, for selected the provinces and cities in this study, there are significant delays in the dates of containment when q = 0, which indicates the current medical tracking policy contribute significantly in containing the epidemic.