COVID-19 and other viruses: holding back its expansion by massive testing

Sainz-Pardo, Jos'e Luis; Valero, Jos'e

The experience of Singapur and South Korea makes it clear that under certain circumstances massive testing is an effective way for containing the advance of the COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a modified SEIR model which takes into account tracing and massive testing, proving theoretically that more tracing and testing implies a reduction of the total number of infected people in the long run. We apply this model to the spread of the first wave of the disease in Spain, obtaining numerical results. After that, we introduce a heuristic approach in order to minimize the COVID-19 spreading by planning effective test distributions among the populations of a region over a period of time. As an application, the impact of distributing tests among the counties of New York according to this method is computed in terms of the number of saved infected individuals.