A New Compartment Model of COVID-19 Transmission: The Broken-Link Model

Yoichi Ikeda, Kenji Sasaki and Takashi Nakano
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Yoichi Ikeda: Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, Kyushu University, Fukuoka 819-0395, Japan
Kenji Sasaki: Center for Infectious Disease Education and Research, Osaka University, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
Takashi Nakano: Center for Infectious Disease Education and Research, Osaka University, Osaka 565-0871, Japan

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 11, 1-10

Abstract: We propose a new compartment model of COVID-19 spread, the broken-link model, which includes the effect from unconnected infectious links of the transmission. The traditional SIR-type epidemic models are widely used to analyze the spread status, and the models show the exponential growth of the number of infected people. However, even in the early stage of the spread, it is proven by the actual data that the exponential growth did not occur all over the world. We presume this is caused by the suppression of secondary and higher-order transmissions of COVID-19. We find that the proposed broken-link model quantitatively describes the mechanism of this suppression, which leads to the shape of epicurves of confirmed cases are governed by the probability of unconnected infectious links, and the magnitudes of the cases are proportional to exp R 0 in each infectious surge generated by a virus of the basic reproduction number R 0 , and is consistent with the actual data.

Keywords: COVID-19; epidemic model; compartment model; delta variant; omicron variant (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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