Chinese and Italian COVID-19 outbreaks can be correctly described by a modified SIRD model

medRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.03.19.20039388.
Diego CACCAVO1，2,3 dcaccavo at unisa.it
1 Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Salerno, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy
2 Department of Pharmacy, University of Salerno, 84084 Fisciano (SA), Italy
3 Eng4Life Srl, Academic spin-off, Via Fiorentino, 32, 83100 Avellino (AV), Italy
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China (dots = actual, lines = model based on dots)

Italy - provided their containment methods are as good as China's

The COVID-19 disease is rapidly spreading in whole globe, affecting millions of people and pushing governments to take drastic measures to contain the outbreaks. The understanding of the dynamics of the epidemic is of great interest for the governments and health authorities that are facing COVID-19 outbreaks. The scarce presence of epidemiologic data, due to the still ongoing outbreaks, makes prediction difficult and mainly based on heuristic (fitting) models. However, these models with non-physical based parameters, can only give limited insight in the evolution of the outbreaks. In this work a SIRD compartmental model was developed to describe and predict the evolution of the Chinese and Italian outbreaks. Exploiting the similarities of the measures taken by the governments to contain the virus and of the total population number of Hubei province and Italy, the model was tuned on the Chinese outbreak (almost extinguished) and by perturbation the Italian outbreak was describe and predicted. With this approach the lack of data due to the still ongoing Italian epidemic was compensated by the Chinese experience, allowing to obtain a SIRD model for this relatively new COVID-19 outbreak. According to the modeling prediction the peak of infection should be on the 28th of March, with almost 42,000 infected people.

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