Short-term forecasts and long-term mitigation evaluations for the COVID-19 epidemic in Hubei Province, China

Qihui Yang; Chunlin Yi; Aram Vajdi; Lee W Cohnstaedt; Hongyu Wu; Xiaolong Guo; Caterina M Scoglio

Second, we simulate the disease spread in Wuhan city with transmission between compartments incorporating non-Markovian dynamics. The transition from compartment → still evolves according to an exponential distribution with = 0.68, while transitions from compartments → and → follow the lognormal distributions from Sanche et al., 2020) in Fig. 6 (a-b) . Note that the width of the infectious period becomes much shorter (blue curve) after January 18 th , as shown in Fig. 6 (a) , because the government has started to trace back and monitor those people who have contact with confirmed cases and built temporary hospitals to hospitalize both patients with mild and severe symptoms since mid-January. In Fig. 6 (a-b) , we also show curves of different exponential distributions compared with these lognormal distributions for demonstration purposes.