Scaling analysis of COVID-19 spreading based on Belgian hospitalization data

Bart Smeets; Rodrigo Watte; Herman Ramon

P is a measure for how strong isolation policies affect the general public in comparison to quarantine measures on infected individuals. Q is the probability that an infected individual is (self)quarantined. Moreover, it allows for the formulation of an effective reproduction number R 0,eff = α/(β + κ + κ 0 ), which is always smaller than the basic reproduction number in free unconstrained growth R 0,free = α/β. Parameters α and β represent intrinsic properties of infectiousness and are not varied, but fixed at α = 0.775 and β = 0.125, corresponding to a recovery time of 8 days, and a free reproduction number of R 0,free = 6.2, as was assumed by the original authors [4] . The free parameters during the fitting procedure are κ, κ 0 and I 0 /X 0 , the initial fraction of infectious individuals.