Feasibility Study of Mitigation and Suppression Intervention Strategies for Controlling COVID-19 Outbreaks in London and Wuhan

Po Yang; Jun Qi; Shuhao Zhang; Xulong Wang; Gaoshan Bi; Yun Yang; Bin Sheng

In traditional compartmental models paradigm in epidemiology, SIR (Susceptible-Infectious-Recovered) [3] and SEIR (Susceptible -Exposure-Infectious-Recovered) [4] are two popular approaches to simulate and predict how infectious disease is transmitted from human to human. These two models have defined several variables that represent the number of people in each compartment at a particular time. As implied by the variable function of time, these models are dynamic to reflect the changes and fluctuations of these numbers in each compartment over time. For COVID-19 control in Wuhan, Zhong, et.al [6] introduced a modified SEIR model in prediction of the epidemics trend of COVID-19 in China, where the results showed that under strong suppression of "lockdown Hubei", the epidemic of COVID-19 in China would achieve peak by late February and gradually decline by the end of April 2020. Some other extended models [8] [12] are also proposed for predicting the epidemics of COVID-19 in Wuhan and give some similar forecasts. While above methods demonstrate good performance in prediction of COVID-19 outbreak by taking strong public intervention, also named as suppression strategy [13] that aims to reverse epidemic growth, one important challenge is that taking suppression strategy only is to treat disease controls as single-objective optimisation of reducing the overall infectious populations as soon as possible, and require strategic consistency in a long term. In real-world, taking public health intervention strategies is actually a multiple-objective optimisation problem including economic loss and society impacts. Thus, most countries have taken different intervention strategies, like enhanced surveillance and isolation to affected individuals in Singapore [14] , four-stage response plan of the UK [15] , mitigation approaches [13] and even multiple interventions taken in many EU countries. Due to the fact that standalone intervention strategy has apparent merits and limitations, it becomes highly necessary to study the feasibility of intervention strategies to certain country in light of its multiple natures and capabilities.