COVID-19 Outbreak in Pakistan: Model-Driven Impact Analysis and Guidelines

Zia, Kashif; Farooq, Umar

Motivated by the rapid spread of COVID-19 all across the globe, we have performed simulations of a system dynamic epidemic spread model in different possible situations. The simulation, not only captures the model dynamic of the spread of the virus, but also, takes care of population and mobility data. The model is calibrated based on epidemic data and events specifically of Pakistan, which can easily be generalized. The simulation results are quite disturbing, indicating that, even with stringent social distancing and testing strategies and for a quite long time (even beyond one year), the spread would be significant (in tens of thousands). The real alarm is when some of these measures got leaked for a short time within this duration, which may result in catastrophic situation when millions of people would be infected.