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

It is quite difficult to have a real specific contact network between each person in Wuhan. Therefore, a generalized network is used, which means that every individual in this area is connected with a possibility. To describe the epidemiology of COVID-19 pneumonia, we used the discrete-time S-I-R model which categorizes the hosts within a population as susceptible (S), infectious (I) and removed (R) (Keeling & Rohani, 2011) . At any discrete time, every individual has to be in one of these 3 compartments. The susceptible are individuals unexposed to the pathogen but can be infected by contact with the infectious population. Infectious individuals can clear the infection by hospitalization, death and quarantine measures and become removed. The equations for the state transitions are shown as follows.