SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) has been causing an outbreak of a new type of pneumonia globally, and repeated outbreaks have already appeared. Among the studies on the spread of the COVID-19, few studies have investigated the repeated outbreaks in stages, and the quantitative condition of a controllable spread has not been revealed. In this paper, a brief compartmental model is developed. The effective reproduction number (ERN) of the model is interpreted by the ratio of net newly infectious individuals to net isolation infections to assess the controllability of the spread of COVID-19. It is found that the value of the ERN at the inflection point of the pandemic is equal to one. The effectiveness of the quarantine, even the treatment, is parametrized in various stages with Gompertz functions to increase modeling accuracy. The impacts of the vaccinations are discussed by adding a vaccinated compartment. The results show that the sufficient vaccinations can make the inflection point appear early and significantly reduce subsequent increases in newly confirmed cases. The analysis of the ERNs of COVID-19 in the United States, Spain, France, and Peru confirms that the condition of a repeated outbreak is to relax or lift the interventions related to isolation and quarantine interventions to a level where the ERN is greater than one.
Keywords: COVID-19; Controllability; Effective reproduction number; Repeated outbreaks; Staged assessment.
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021.