Implications of Delayed Reopening in Controlling the COVID-19 Surge in Southern and West-Central USA

Raj Dandekar; Emma Wang; George Barbastathis; Chris Rackauckas

doi:10.34133/2021/9798302

Implications of Delayed Reopening in Controlling the COVID-19 Surge in Southern and West-Central USA

Health Data Sci. 2021 Oct 28:2021:9798302. doi: 10.34133/2021/9798302. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Raj Dandekar¹, Emma Wang², George Barbastathis^{3

4}, Chris Rackauckas⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Computational Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA MA 02139.
² Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
⁴ Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre, Singapore 138602.
⁵ Department of Applied Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.

Abstract

In the wake of the rapid surge in the COVID-19-infected cases seen in Southern and West-Central USA in the period of June-July 2020, there is an urgent need to develop robust, data-driven models to quantify the effect which early reopening had on the infected case count increase. In particular, it is imperative to address the question: How many infected cases could have been prevented, had the worst affected states not reopened early? To address this question, we have developed a novel COVID-19 model by augmenting the classical SIR epidemiological model with a neural network module. The model decomposes the contribution of quarantine strength to the infection time series, allowing us to quantify the role of quarantine control and the associated reopening policies in the US states which showed a major surge in infections. We show that the upsurge in the infected cases seen in these states is strongly corelated with a drop in the quarantine/lockdown strength diagnosed by our model. Further, our results demonstrate that in the event of a stricter lockdown without early reopening, the number of active infected cases recorded on 14 July could have been reduced by more than 40% in all states considered, with the actual number of infections reduced being more than 100,000 for the states of Florida and Texas. As we continue our fight against COVID-19, our proposed model can be used as a valuable asset to simulate the effect of several reopening strategies on the infected count evolution, for any region under consideration.