COVID-19 spreading in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Do the policies of social isolation really work?

Nuno Crokidakis

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2020, vol. 136, issue C

Abstract: The recent Coronavirus has been spreading through all the world fastly. In this work we focus on the evolution of the COVID-19 in one of the most populous Brazilian states, namely the Rio de Janeiro state. The first case was reported in March 5, 2020, thus we have a considerable amount of available data to make a good analysis. We study the dynamics of COVID-19 through a Susceptible-Infectious-Quarantined-Recovered (SIQR) model with an additional mechanism that represents the implementation of public policies of social isolation. Based on the data collected from the Rio de Janeiro state Department of Health from March 5, 2020 through April 26, 2020, we observed that the implementation of social distancing policies changed the initial exponential growth to a sub-exponential one. The SIQR model with the above-mentioned mechanism is capable of reproducing the data of confirmed cases in Rio de Janeiro, and it explains how that change occurred. The model also predicts an important mitigation effect, namely the flattening effect, i.e., the considerably decrease of the maximum number of confirmed cases. Through the results of the model, this effect can be directly related to the social isolation policies. Finally, we consider the relaxation of such policies, and discuss about the ideal period of time to release people to return to their activities.

Keywords: Dynamics of social systems; Epidemic modeling; Collective phenomena; Data analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077920303295
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:136:y:2020:i:c:s0960077920303295

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2020.109930

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().