The focus and timing of COVID-19 pandemic control measures under healthcare resource constraints

Chen Wei; Zhengyang Wang; Zhichao Liang; Quanying Liu

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04. 16.20067611 doi: medRxiv preprint control that would be enough to lower the peak of patient number by prolonging the outbreak duration and thus preventing healthcare system overflow. However, our simulation proved this strategy to be flawed regarding COVID-19 ( Figure 4 ). Successful suppressions are featured by greatly reduced outbreak size and duration. In contrast, prolonged outbreak durations indicate inadequate transmission control, in which case healthcare system overload is unavoidable ( Figure 4C&F ). Consequently, the number of untreated infections (and thus the death toll) would outgrow that of the treated by orders of magnitude ( Figure 4F ). Either consequence would be in violation of the goals behind the "flattening the curve" strategy. A similar conclusion has been drawn 11 The timing for lifting control policies and the potential for a rebound in transmission thereafter were not explicitly investigated in this study. Under a given situation of successful suppression where the majority of the population was not infected, herd immunity would have to be established by population-wide vaccination 11, 17 . Until an effective vaccine is developed, a partial relaxation of transmission control policies while maintaining suppression would nonetheless be potentially achievable by ensuring a close monitoring of the daily reproduction number. The reason behind it was evident in Figure . CC-BY 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.