The impact of community containment implementation timing on the spread of COVID-19: A simulation study

This code and data are linked to F1000Research article: (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.24156.1)

Abstract

Background: Community containment is one of the common methods used to mitigate infectious disease outbreaks. The effectiveness of such method depends on how strictly it is applied and the timing of its implementation. Early start and being strict is very effective, at the same time, it impacts freedom and economic opportunity. Here we created a simulation model to understand the effect of starting day on the final outcome, that is, number of infected, hospitalized and dead victims, as we followed the dynamics of COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: We used stochastic recursive simulation method to apply disease outbreak dynamics measures of COVID-19 as an example to simulate the disease spread. Parameters are allowed to be randomly assigned between higher and lower values obtained from published COVID-19 litrature.

Results: We simulated the dynamics of COVID-19 spread, calculated the number of active, hospitalized and dead cases as outcome of our simulation and compared these results with real world data. We also represented the details of the spread in a network graph structure, and shared the code for the simulation model to be used for examining other variables.

Conclusion: Early implementation of community containment has a big impact on the final outcome of an outbreak.