How Seasonality and Control Measures Jointly Determine the Multistage Waves of the COVID-19 Epidemic: A Modelling Study and Implications

Yangcheng Zheng and Yunpeng Wang
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Yangcheng Zheng: State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640, China
Yunpeng Wang: State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry, Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510640, China

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 11, 1-11

Abstract: The current novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a multistage epidemic consisting of multiple rounds of alternating outbreak and containment periods that cannot be modeled with a conventional single-stage Suspected-Exposed-Infectious-Removed (SEIR) model. Seasonality and control measures could be the two most important driving factors of the multistage epidemic. Our goal is to formulate and incorporate the influences of seasonality and control measures into an epidemic model and interpret how these two factors interact to shape the multistage epidemic curves. New confirmed cases will be collected daily from seven Northern Hemisphere countries and five Southern Hemisphere countries from March 2020 to March 2021 to fit and validate the modified model. Results show that COVID-19 is a seasonal epidemic and that epidemic curves can be clearly distinguished in the two hemispheres. Different levels of control measures between different countries during different seasonal periods have different influences on epidemic transmission. Seasonality alone cannot cause the baseline reproduction number R 0 to fall below one and control measures must be taken. A superposition of a high level of seasonality and a low level of control measures can lead to a dramatically rapid increase in reported cases.

Keywords: COVID-19; multi-stage; control measures; seasonality; SEIR model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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