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

Benjamin F Maier; Dirk Brockmann

Our analysis further implies and provides evidence that mitigation strategies that target the susceptible population and induce behavioral changes at this "end" of the transmission process are most effective to contain an epidemic-especially in situations when asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infectious periods are long or their duration unknown. This may be of importance for developing containment strategies in future scenarios or if the current COVID-19 epidemic were to trigger large scale outbreaks in other regions of the world by exports and subsequent proliferation. Fits were performed using the Levenberg-Marquardt method of least squares. We fixed the epidemiological parameters to duration of infection T I = 8 d and basic reproduction number R 0,free = αT I = 6.2. The population size N of each of the affected Chinese provinces was obtained from the Geonames project [20] and is listed in Tab. I. For each confirmed cases data set, we set the initial conditions X(t 0 ) = C(t 0 )/N,