Abstract
The pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, although more than a year has passed since the first case, still plagues almost the whole world. Several policies have been adopted, especially related to social distancing measures, aiming to mitigate the spread of the disease. Such decisions, in general, take into account simulations capable of providing an overview of the spread of the virus in a given location. Based on the guidelines of the World Health Organization, countries have defined their own policies to fight against the disease, considering economic and social interests. Determining strategies that are increasingly efficient in modeling and simulating such phenomena is essential to support decision making in adverse circumstances. Our objective is to provide a more comprehensive view of strategies for predicting the spread of COVID-19 in the scope of computational modeling and to analyze scenarios capable of describing the impact of social distancing measures. Two different strategies are compared to characterize the virus incubation period, using particular models. Since Italy was one of the countries most affected by the pandemic, despite taking drastic measures to reduce mobility and contact between citizens, we adopt the situation of the early stages of the disease outbreak in this country to demonstrate the numerical results.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Amendola, A., Bianchi, S., Gori, M., Colzani, D., Canuti, M., Borghi, E., Raviglione, M.C., Zuccotti, G.V., Tanzi, E.: Evidence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in an Oropharyngeal Swab Specimen, Milan, Italy, early December 2019. Emerging Infectious Diseases 27(2) (2021). https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2702.204632
Berardi, C., Antonini, M., Genie, M.G., Cotugno, G., Lanteri, A., Melia, A., Paolucci, F.: The COVID-19 pandemic in Italy: Policy and technology impact on health and non-health outcomes. Health Policy and Technology 9(4), 454–487 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hlpt.2020.08.019
D’Arienzo, M., Coniglio, A.: Assessment of the SARS-CoV-2 basic reproduction number, \( \mathcal {R}_{0} \), based on the early phase of COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Biosafety and Health 2(2), 57–59 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bsheal.2020.03.004
Dehning, J., Zierenberg, J., Spitzner, F.P., Wibral, M., Neto, J.P., Wilczek, M., Priesemann, V.: Inferring change points in the spread of COVID-19 reveals the effectiveness of interventions. Science 369(6500), eabb9789 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb9789
Dickson, M.M., Espa, G., Giuliani, D., Santi, F., Savadori, L.: Assessing the effect of containment measures on the spatio-temporal dynamic of COVID-19 in Italy. Nonlinear Dynamics 101(3), 1833–1846 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11071-020-05853-7
Dong, E., Du, H., Gardner, L.: An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. The Lancet Infectious Diseases 20(5), 533–534 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1
Gatto, M., Bertuzzo, E., Mari, L., Miccoli, S., Carraro, L., Casagrandi, R., Rinaldo, A.: Spread and dynamics of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: Effects of emergency containment measures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(19), 10484–10491 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004978117
Gregori, D., Azzolina, D., Lanera, C., Prosepe, I., Destro, N., Lorenzoni, G., Berchialla, P.: A first estimation of the impact of public health actions against COVID-19 in Veneto (Italy). Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health pp. jech–2020–214209 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2020-214209
Guzzetta, G., Riccardo, F., Marziano, V., Poletti, P., Trentini, F., Bella, A., Andrianou, X., Del Manso, M., Fabiani, M., Bellino, S., Boros, S., Urdiales, A.M., Vescio, M.F., Piccioli, A., Brusaferro, S., Rezza, G., Pezzotti, P., Ajelli, M., Merler, S.: Impact of a nationwide lockdown on SARS-CoV-2 transmissibility, Italy. Emerging Infectious Diseases 27(1), 267–270 (2021). https://doi.org/10.3201/eid2701.202114
Hoffman, M.D., Gelman, A.: The No-U-Turn sampler: Adaptively setting path lengths in Hamiltonian Monte Carlo. Journal of Machine Learning Research 15(47), 1593–1623 (2014). https://doi.org/10.5555/2627435.2638586
Keeling, M.J., Rohani, P.: Modeling Infectious Diseases in Humans and Animals, 1 edn. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2008)
Kreutz, C., Raue, A., Kaschek, D., Timmer, J.: Profile likelihood in systems biology. FEBS Journal 280(11), 2564–2571 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1111/febs.12276
Lilleri, D., Zavaglio, F., Gabanti, E., Gerna, G., Arbustini, E.: Analysis of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic in Italy: The role of local and interventional factors in the control of the epidemic. PLOS ONE 15(11), e0242305 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242305
Liu, P.Y., He, S., Rong, L.B., Tang, S.Y.: The effect of control measures on COVID-19 transmission in Italy: Comparison with Guangdong province in China. Infectious Diseases of Poverty 9(1), 130 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40249-020-00730-2
McAloon, C., Collins, Á., Hunt, K., Barber, A., Byrne, A.W., Butler, F., Casey, M., Griffin, J., Lane, E., McEvoy, D., Wall, P., Green, M., O’Grady, L., More, S.J.: Incubation period of COVID-19: a rapid systematic review and meta-analysis of observational research. BMJ Open 10(8), e039652 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-039652
Raue, A., Kreutz, C., Maiwald, T., Bachmann, J., Schilling, M., Klingmüller, U., Timmer, J.: Structural and practical identifiability analysis of partially observed dynamical models by exploiting the profile likelihood. Bioinformatics 25(15), 1923–1929 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btp358
Raue, A., Kreutz, C., Theis, F.J., Timmer, J.: Joining forces of Bayesian and frequentist methodology: a study for inference in the presence of non-identifiability. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 371(1984), 20110544 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2011.0544
Reno, C., Lenzi, J., Navarra, A., Barelli, E., Gori, D., Lanza, A., Valentini, R., Tang, B., Fantini, M.P.: Forecasting COVID-19-associated hospitalizations under different levels of social distancing in Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna, Northern Italy: Results from an extended SEIR compartmental model. Journal of Clinical Medicine 9(5), 1492 (2020). https://doi.org/10.3390/jcm9051492
Salvatier, J., Wiecki, T.V., Fonnesbeck, C.: Probabilistic programming in Python using PyMC3. PeerJ Computer Science 2, e55 (2016). https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.55
Sebastiani, G., Massa, M., Riboli, E.: COVID-19 epidemic in Italy: evolution, projections and impact of government measures. European Journal of Epidemiology 35(4), 341–345 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-020-00631-6
Supino, M., D’Onofrio, A., Luongo, F., Occhipinti, G., Dal Co, A.: The effects of containment measures in the Italian outbreak of COVID-19. BMC Public Health 20(1), 1806 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-020-09913-w
Traini, M.C., Caponi, C., Ferrari, R., De Socio, G.V.: A study of SARS-CoV-2 epidemiology in Italy: from early days to secondary effects after social distancing. Infectious Diseases 52(12), 866–876 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/23744235.2020.1797157
Vicentini, C., Bordino, V., Gardois, P., Zotti, C.: Early assessment of the impact of mitigation measures on the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy. Public Health 185, 99–101 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2020.06.028
Worldometer: World population. URL https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/italy-population/. Visited on 18 Jan 2020
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication (MCTIC) of Brazil. Gustavo Libotte is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Institutional Training Program (PCI) of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), grant number 303185/2020-1.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lobato, F.S., Libotte, G.B., Platt, G.M., Almeida, R.C., Silva, R.S., Malta, S.M.C. (2021). Simulations of Social Distancing Scenarios and Analysis of Strategies to Predict the Spread of COVID-19. In: Toni, B. (eds) The Mathematics of Patterns, Symmetries, and Beauties in Nature. STEAM-H: Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Mathematics & Health. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84596-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84596-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-84595-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-84596-4
eBook Packages: Mathematics and StatisticsMathematics and Statistics (R0)