Estimating the Efficacy of Traffic Blockage and Quarantine for the Epidemic Caused by 2019-nCoV (COVID-19)
Deqiang Li, Zhicheng Liu, Qinghe Liu, Zefei Gao, Junkai Zhu, Junyan Yang, Qiao Wang
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.14.20022913
Abstract
Since the 2019-nCoV (COVID-19) outbreaks in Wuhan, China, the cumulative number of confirmed cases is increasing every day, and a large number of populations all over the world are at risk. The traffic blockage and quarantine can alleviate the risk of the epidemic and the infections. Evaluating the efficacy of such actions is essential to inform policy makers and raise the public awareness of the importance of self-isolation and quarantine. We apply our Flow-SEIR model to estimate the number of infections as well as the evaluate the policy of traffic blockage and quarantine, based on the data of confirmed case and the migration in China. We define two factors related to traffic blockage and quarantine to estimate the efficacy of these two intervation measures. In our study, since the public are urged to stay at home and self-protective, the self-protection at home is also accounted as a part of quarantine. In the simulated results, the quarantine is very effective for epidemic control, when the quarantine factor ε is close to 1, all the population is isolated from others, the peak number of infections will decrease by 89.68%. And the traffic blockage is also effective, however, provincial level traffic blockage can only alleviate 21.06% - 22.38% of the peak number of the infections. For Hubei Province, if the quarantine is 1 week earlier, the peak number of infections will decrease by 24.26% - 25.33%, if the traffic blockage is one week earlier, the peak number of infections only decreased by 3.10% - 3.79%. For the other provinces outside Hubei, if the quarantine is one week of earlier, the peak number will decrease by 32.78% - 35.60%, if the traffic blockage is one week earlier, the peak number of infections will decrease by 15.30% - 16.70%. If there is one day in advance for urban blockage, about 3,600 people will eventually be reduced in the country. If there is one day of delay, about 1,800 people will finally be at risk. In general, the effect of quarantine is even stronger than the traffic blockage control. The fact should not be ignored that there are still a large number of population who are exposed to the SARS-COV-2 but not yet symptomatic. Those exposed population is not easy to be found and infect others who are closely contacting with. So the traffic blockage and quarantine should be continued for a long time util the epidemic is totally under control.
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