The influence of mask use on the spread of COVID-19 during pandemic in New York City

Xia Ma; Xiao-Feng Luo; Li Li; Yong Li; Gui-Quan Sun

doi:10.1016/j.rinp.2022.105224

The influence of mask use on the spread of COVID-19 during pandemic in New York City

Results Phys. 2022 Mar:34:105224. doi: 10.1016/j.rinp.2022.105224. Epub 2022 Jan 22.

Authors

Xia Ma^{1

2

3}, Xiao-Feng Luo², Li Li⁴, Yong Li⁵, Gui-Quan Sun^{1

2

6}

Affiliations

¹ School of Big Data, North University of China, Taiyuan, 030051, China.
² Department of Mathematics, North University of China, Taiyuan, 030051, China.
³ Department of Science, Taiyuan Institute of Technology, Taiyuan, 030008, China.
⁴ School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, 030006, China.
⁵ School of Information and Mathematics, Yangtze University, Jingzhou, 434023, China.
⁶ Complex Systems Research Center, Shanxi University, Taiyuan, 030006, China.

Abstract

In New York City, the situation of COVID-19 is so serious that it has caused hundreds of thousands of people to be infected due to its strong infectivity. The desired effect of wearing masks by the public is not ideal, though increasingly recommended by the WHO. In order to reveal the potential effect of mask use, we posed a dynamical model with the effective coverage of wearing face masks to assess the impact of mask use on the COVID-19 transmission. We obtained the basic reproduction number $R_{0}$ which determined the global dynamics. According to the implement of policies in New York City, we divided the transmission of COVID-19 in three stages. Based on mathematical model and data, we obtain the mean value $R_{0} = 1.822$ in the first stage of New York City, while $R_{0} = 0.6483$ in the second stage due to that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the public wear masks on April 3, 2020, $R_{0} = 1.024$ in the third stage after reopening. It was found that if the effective coverage rate of mask use $α$ exceed a certain value $α_{c} = 0.182$ , COVID-19 can be well controlled in the second stage of New York City. Additionally, when the effective coverage of masks reaches a certain level $α = 0.5$ , the benefits are not obvious with the increased coverage rate compared to the cost of medical resources. Moreover, if the effective coverage of mask use in public reaches 20% in the first stage, then the cumulative confirmed cases will be reduced about 50% by 03 April, 2020. Our results demonstrated a new insight on the effect of mask use in controlling the transmission of COVID-19.

Keywords: Basic reproduction number; COVID-19; Face mask; Markov chain; Parameter estimation; Sensitivity analysis.