Authors:

Sachi Barnaby

Date Created:

Not specified

Course Title:

Professor:

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About Paper:

During an epidemic, minimizing the infection peak, or "flattening the curve", is essential to lowering the number of infections at any given time, avoiding overwhelming healthcare services, and saving lives. One strategy that has been developed to flatten the curve is a community lockdown where travel and business are restricted to reduce transmission of the disease. Though there are a variety of lockdown styles, this work focuses on a staggered approach where the populations implement a partial lockdown at different start times that limits most (not all) transmission of the disease for a fixed period of time. We modeled the spreading process using the SIR (Susceptible, Infectious, Recovered) framework on a two-population network. Our work shows the effect of these lockdowns on the populations using simulations, and we perform an exploratory analysis that provides insight into an optimal strategy for staggered lockdowns. We find the lockdown start time for each population that leads to its most flattened peak often occurs at the expense of the other population. By calculating an average of the populations' maximum infection level, we find a separate global minimum for the infection peak that suggests an optimal staggered lockdown strategy for the whole network based on average flatness rather than individual population flatness. This work hopes to contribute to the growing body of research related to networked epidemic processes and could be extended for other lockdown approaches or epidemic models.

Source:

Purdue University / 2023

Topics:

No topics listed

Co-authors:

Sachi Barnaby