The SARS-CoV-2 epidemic outbreak: a review of plausible scenarios of containment and mitigation for Mexico

Manuel Adrian Acuna-Zegarra; Andreu Comas-Garcia; Esteban Hernandez-Vargas; Mario Santana-Cibrian; Jorge X. Velasco-Hernandez

where, we remind the reader correspond to the contact rates of asymptomatic and symptomatic infecteds, the incubation and infectious period and the proportion of asymptomatic cases respectively. Figure 7 illustrates the behavior of the contact rates for asymptomaticsβ a (t) and for symptomaticsβ s (t). For both rates, the efficacy of education on the behavioral change is the same since we assume that education is not related to symptomatology although there is some evidence that this might not be the case. A first result is that if the time it takes to obtain the desired contact rate reduction θ increases then the reduction rate of both contact rates is slower. 9 show that if the time it takes to achieve a reduction in contact rate increases then the number of infectious cases is greater reflecting the slow rate of behavioral change. Figure 8 a) and b) show the prevalence and cumulative incidence respectively, for an scenario with a target reduction of contact rate of 25%, the initiation of the behavioral change is T θ = 15 days after 10 cases are detected and where 80% of those are asymptomatic. For comparison, a red dashed line shows the epidemic curves when no behavioral change is enforced. Here we see that although the reduction of contact rate is low (25%) (q 1 = 0.75), in the long run behavioral change helps to reduce the incidence. We also note that in addition to the reduction in cases, as the time to achieve the contact rate reduction increases, the epidemic outbreak starts earlier and is larger. Figure 9 shows the behavior of the prevalence (a) and cumulative incidence (b) when the contact rate is reduced by 50% (q 1 = 0.5). In this situation the relevance of the behavioral change to reduce the incidence is rather clear. Notice that if the time necessary 12 . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.