Quantitative Effects of COVID-19 Pandemic Containment Policies

Abstract

Countries are implementing containment policies to fight the coronavirus 2019 pandemic. We extend the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) model to include asymptomatic cases, which account for around 20%. We consider the cumulative confirmed and death cases in Italy and South Korea for our model estimation. The data for Italy, collated up to March 14, 2020, are not affected by any containment policy, whereas the data for South Korea collated up to the end of April 2020 reflect four containment policies: social distancing, preemptive quarantine, testing and quarantine of symptomatic or asymptomatic patients. Our policy experiments show that the testing and quarantine of symptomatic patients are very effective to contain, but not enough to extinguish, the epidemic. Thus, testing and quarantine should include the asymptomatic cases as well.