Data-Driven Study of the COVID-19 Pandemic via Age-Structured Modelling and Prediction of the Health System Failure in Brazil amid Diverse Intervention Strategies

Abstract

In this work we propose a data-driven age-structured census-based SIRD-like epidemiological model capable of forecasting the spread of COVID-19 in Brazil. We model the current scenario of closed schools and universities, social distancing of individuals above sixty years old and voluntary home quarantine to show that it led to a considerable reduction in the number of infections as compared with a scenario without any control measures. Notwithstanding, our model predicts that the current measures are not enough to avoid overloading the health system, since the demand for intensive care units will soon surpass the number available. We also show that an urgent intense quarantine might be the only solution to avoid this scenario and, consequently, minimize the number of severe cases and deaths. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the early relaxation of the undergoing isolation measures would lead to an increase of millions of infections in a short period of time and the consecutive collapse of the health system.