A modified SEIR model to predict the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain and Italy: Simulating control scenarios and multi-scale epidemics

After the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic out of China, evolution in the pandemic worldwide shows dramatic differences among countries. In Europe, the situation of Italy first and later Spain has generated great concen, and despite other countries show better prospects, large uncertainties yet remain on the future evolution and the efficacy of containment, mitigation, or attack strategies. This Manuscript was originally written in the last days of March as a way to report on the first current wave of the pandemic. The results were updated several times for March and also for the month of July. Here we applied a modified SEIR compartmental model accounting for the spread of infection during the latent period, in which we also incorporate effects of varying proportions of containment. We fit data to reported infected populations at the beginning of the first peak of the pandemic to account for the uncertainties in case reporting and study the scenario projections for the individual regions (CCAA). The aim of this model it’s to evaluate the confinement rate at the first stages of the epidemic outbreak in order to assess the scenarios that minimize the incidence but also the mortality. Results indicate that with data for March 23, the epidemics follow an evolution similar to the isolation of [Formula: see text] percent of the population, and if there were no effects of intervention actions it might reach a maximum of over [Formula: see text] infected around April 27. The effect on the epidemics of the ongoing partial confinement measures is yet unknown (an update of results with data until March 31st is included), but increasing the isolation around ten times more could drastically reduce the peak to over [Formula: see text] cases by early April, while each day of delay in taking this hard containment scenario represents a 90 percent increase of the infected population at the peak. Dynamics at the sub aggregated levels of CCAA show epidemics at the different levels of progression with the most worrying situation in Madrid and Catalonia. Increasing alpha values up to 10 times, in addition to a drastic reduction in clinical cases, would also more than a half the number of deaths. Updates for March 31st simulations indicate a substantial reduction in burden is underway. A similar approach conducted for Italy pre-and post-intervention also begins to suggest a substantial reduction in both infected and deaths has been achieved, showing the efficacy of drastic social distancing interventions. By last we show the real evolution of the pandemic up to the end of May and the beginning of July in order to calculate the real confinement rate from data to compare with the scenarios formulated at March.