Effective containment explains sub-exponential growth in confirmed cases of recent COVID-19 outbreak in Mainland China

Benjamin F Maier; Dirk Brockmann

Note that the described saturation behavior of confirmed cases requires that eventually all susceptibles will effectively be removed from the transmission process. In reality, not every susceptible person can be isolated for such an extended period of time as the model suggests. One might expect instead that the number of infecteds will decay more slowly and saturate to a small, yet non-zero level. At this point it would be crucial to identify unquarantined infecteds more efficiently in order to completely shut down the transmission process. Due to potential difficulties in upholding the containment policies for such an extended period of time, we expect that our predictions will underestimate the final total amount of confirmed cases.