Optimal strategies for coordinating infection control and socio-economic activities

It becomes challenging to identify feasible control strategies for simultaneously relaxing the countermeasures and containing the Covid-19 pandemic, given China’s huge population size, high susceptibility, persist vaccination waning, and relatively weak strength of health systems. We propose a novel mathematical model with waning of immunity and solve the optimal control problem, in order to provide an insight on how much detecting and social distancing are required to coordinate socio-economic activities and epidemic control. We obtain the optimal intensity of countermeasures, i.e., the dynamic nucleic acid screening and social distancing, under which the health system is functioning normally and people can engage in a certain level of socio-economic activities. We find that it is the isolation capacity or the restriction of the case fatality rate (CFR) rather than the hospital capacity that mainly determines the optimal strategies. And the solved optimal controls under quarterly CFR restrictions exhibit oscillations. It is worth noticing that, if without considering booster or very low booster rate, the optimal strategy is a “on–off” mode, alternating between lock down and opening with certain social distancing, which reflects the importance and necessity of China’s static management on a certain area during Covid-19 outbreak. The findings suggest some feasible paths to smoothly transit from the Covid-19 pandemic to an endemic phase.