Possible fates of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Mexican context

Abstract

The determination of the adequate time for house confinement and when social distancing restrictions should end are now two of the main challenges that any country has to face in an ongoing battle against SARS-CoV-2. The possibility of a new outbreak of the pandemic and how to avoid it is, nowadays, one of the primary objectives of epidemiological research. In this work, we present an innovative compartmental model that explicitly introduces the number of active cases, and employ it as a conceptual tool to explore the possible fates of the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Mexican context. We incorporated the impact of starting, inattention and end of restrictive social policies on the pandemic’s time evolution via time-dependent corrections to the infection rates. The magnitude and impact on the epidemic due to post-social restrictive policies are also studied. The scenarios generated by the model could help authorities determine an adequate time and population load that may be allowed to reassume normal activities.

Keywords

• SARS-CoV-2
• social-ecological system
• compartmental model
• economic pressure