To mask or not to mask: Modeling the potential for face mask use by the general public to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic

Steffen E. Eikenberry; Marina Mancuso; Enahoro Iboi; Tin Phan; Keenan Eikenberry; Yang Kuang; Eric Kostelich; Abba B. Gumel

where is the total population in the community, and β(t) is the baseline infectious contact rate, which is assumed to vary with time in general, but typically taken fixed. Additionally, η accounts for the relative infectiousness of asymptomatic carriers (in comparison to symptomatic carriers), σ is the transition rate from the exposed to infectious class (so 1/σ is the disease incubation period), α is the fraction of cases that are symptomatic, ϕ is the rate at which symptomatic individuals are hospitalized, δ is the disease-induced death rate, and γ A , γ I and γ H are recovery rates for the subscripted population. We suppose hospitalized persons are not exposed to the general population. Thus, they are excluded from the tabulation of N , and do not contribute to infection rates in the general community. This general modeling framework is similar to a variety of SEIR-style models recently employed in [38, 39] , for example.