Targeted adaptive isolation strategy for Covid-19 pandemic

Zoltan Neufeld; Hamid Khataee

Our model and conclusions rely on the separation of the population based on age and health into two compartments with very different outcomes and applying differentiated protective measures while allowing for the development of immunity in the rest of the population. At the time of writing, certain countries follow various combinations of social distancing and isolation. In Sweden, only moderate social distancing is implemented which will likely lead to development of immunity in the population. This strategy, however, without introducing targeted measures to protect the vulnerable population may lead to high mortality and over-saturation of the health care system. Italy and Spain, on the other hand implemented severe social distancing, but so far this seems to be unable to stop the progress of the epidemic and may in fact be on track towards achieving large scale infection and immunity in the population. However, with too much focus on the implementation of uniform social distancing and no clear targeted measures for identifying and efficiently protecting the vulnerable sub-population can lead to a scenario with high mortality in spite of the high social and economic costs of an extended and potentially recurrent epidemic. Another interesting observation is the striking difference between the mortality within the confirmed infected patients in Italy (∼ 10%) compared to Germany (∼ 1%). While there can be multiple reasons for this difference, it is possible that the closer social and family interactions between the older and younger generations in Italy, corresponds to a higher baseline value of µ, and/or the current exposure of the disease targets mainly the younger population in Germany with policies in place to decrease the exposure of the vulnerable population.