An age and space structured SIR model describing the Covid-19 pandemic

Rinaldo M Colombo; Mauro Garavello; Francesca Marcellini; Elena Rossi

doi:10.1186/s13362-020-00090-4

An age and space structured SIR model describing the Covid-19 pandemic

J Math Ind. 2020;10(1):22. doi: 10.1186/s13362-020-00090-4. Epub 2020 Aug 8.

Authors

Rinaldo M Colombo¹, Mauro Garavello², Francesca Marcellini¹, Elena Rossi²

Affiliations

¹ INdaM Unit, University of Brescia, Via Branze 38, Brescia, 25123 Italy.
² Dept. of Mathematics and its Applications, University of Milano-Bicocca, Via R. Cozzi 55, Milan, 20125 Italy.

Abstract

We present an epidemic model capable of describing key features of the Covid-19 pandemic. While capturing several qualitative properties of the virus spreading, it allows to compute the basic reproduction number, the number of deaths due to the virus and various other statistics. Numerical integrations are used to illustrate the adherence of the evolutions described by the model to specific well known real features of the present pandemic. In particular, this model is consistent with the well known relevance of quarantine, shows the dramatic role of care houses and accounts for the increase in the death toll when spatial movements are not constrained.

Electronic supplementary material: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13362-020-00090-4) contains supplementary material.

Keywords: Age and Space Structured SIR Model; Covid-19 Modeling; Differential Equations in Epidemic Modeling.