

By 21 March 2020, the disease established a sustained local transmission in many countries around the globe, with more than 180 countries and territories affected, including Italy, Spain, Iran, the United States, Germany, France, and South Korea as the top eight affected nations dong2020interactive hopkins. As of 21 March 2020, when significant intervention measures were introduced in Australia, over 285,000 cases have been confirmed worldwide, causing more than 11,500 deaths and in a month, by 23 April, the total number has grown to exceed 2.628 million cases, with more than 183,400 deaths dong2020interactive hopkins.

The epidemic has been recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO) as a public health emergency of international concern on 31 January 2020, and on 11 March 2020 the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic WHO11032020. ĭespite the unprecedented and robust prevention and control measures, the spread of COVID-19 was not contained to China, and the disease spread to other countries. Within cities), cancellation of mass gathering activities, and other measures aimed to reduce transmission of the infection wang2020novel WHOChina ChinaCDC. This was largely due to intense quarantine and social distancing measures, including isolation of detected cases, tracing and management of their close contacts, closures of potential zoonotic sources of SARS-CoV-2, strict traffic restrictions and quarantine on the level of entire provinces (including suspension of public transportation, closures of airports, railway stations, and highways The first outbreak, which originated in December 2019 in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, and rapidly spread to the rest of Hubei and all other provinces in China, has been largely eradicated within mainland China by mid- to late March 2020, having generated more than 81,000 cases (cumulative incidence on 20 March 2020 NHC ). The 2019-2020 coronavirus pandemic is an ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). We report several trade-offs, and an important transition across the levels of social distancing compliance, in the range between 70% and 80% levels, with compliance at the 90% level found to control the disease within 13–14 weeks, when coupled with effective case isolation and international travel restrictions. School closures are not found to bring decisive benefits, unless coupled with high level of social distancing compliance. We apply the model to compare several intervention strategies, including restrictions on international air travel, case isolation, home quarantine, social distancing with varying levels of compliance, and school closures. An important calibration outcome is the age-dependent fraction of symptomatic cases, with this fraction for children found to be one-fifth of such fraction for adults. This model is calibrated to reproduce key characteristics of COVID-19 transmission. We develop an agent-based model for a fine-grained computational simulation of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in Australia.
