Method for Active Pandemic Curve Management (MAPCM)

Willem G Odendaal

The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not peer-reviewed) is the . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.06.20055699 doi: medRxiv preprint 3) suspending economic activity over even brief periods of time carry excessive cost. Sustained mitigation to flatten the curve is the worst of both worlds from an economic perspective as shown in Figure 1 (a). Not only is the economic activity halted thus pushing an otherwise healthy economy into freefall, it also prolongs it well beyond the herd immunity situation. As shown in Figure 1 (b) MAPCM can start off with similar levels of mitigation, but immediately starts lifting them gradually which eases the economy back to normal from day one. A disappointing outcome of these increasinly stringent containment strategies is that while the outbreak curves are indeed being scaled down, they aren't flattened by much. In fact, the curves for projected hospitalizations with full mitigation remain exponential with peak amplitudes that still exceed available healthcare capacities as shown in Figure 2 and again in Figure 3 , which depicts new cases being reported daily under a few different strategies.