Abstract
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic spread to the UK in early 2020 with the first few cases being identified in late January. A rapid increase in confirmed cases started in March, and the number of infected people is however unknown, largely due to the rather limited testing scale. A number of reports published so far reveal that the COVID-19 has long incubation period, high fatality ratio and non-specific symptoms, making this novel coronavirus far different from common seasonal influenza. In this note, we present a modified SEIR model which takes into account the latency effect and probability distribution of model states. Based on the proposed model, it was estimated in April 2020 that the actual total number of infected people by 1 April in the UK might have already exceeded 610,000. Average fatality rates under different assumptions at the beginning of April 2020 were also estimated. Our model also revealed that the \(R_0\) value was between 7.5–9 which is much larger than most of the previously reported values. The proposed model has a potential to be used for assessing future epidemic situations under different intervention strategies.
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Notes
- 1.
According to WHO report people can shed COVID-19 virus 24–48 h prior to symptom onset [2].
- 2.
In average, patients may need hospital admission on the 3rd day after symptom onset [3] after onset of non-mild symptoms, i.e. after people develop fever/dry cough symptoms they need either be under quarantine in hospital or start self-isolation at home. State H(t) is used to represent the accumulation of people that need hospital treatment.
- 3.
According to the WHO report, 80% of the patients experienced mild illness [1].
- 4.
This model is used to fit the death case curve, the variation on \(\beta (t)\) after lockdown does not affect death number from February to the early April. So for convenience, \(\frac{1}{50}\beta \) is used.
- 5.
Up to 10 Apr 2020.
- 6.
Because the hospitalised number is based on Chinese data. It can be different from the UK scenario where the hospital admission procedures are different. In Fig. 11, \(\lambda _H\) is set to 4%.
- 7.
When people go out for work the reproduction ratio r may become 4. On the next day all people should stay at home and r is suppressed to 0.2.
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Sun, P., Li, K., Yang, Z., Du, D. (2020). An SEIR Model for Assessment of COVID-19 Pandemic Situation. In: Fei, M., Li, K., Yang, Z., Niu, Q., Li, X. (eds) Recent Featured Applications of Artificial Intelligence Methods. LSMS 2020 and ICSEE 2020 Workshops. LSMS ICSEE 2020 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1303. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6378-6_37
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