Study of the effectiveness of partial quarantines applied to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus

Abstract

AbstractIn Chile and in many countries of the world, partial quarantines have been used as part of the strategy to contain and control the Covid-19 virus. However, there is no certainty of its effectiveness and efficiency due to the lack of comparison with similar scenarios. In this work, we formulated a theoretical model of individual mobility, which also incorporates the infection dynamics of Covid-19. The model is based on a cellular automaton, which includes individuals moving through the represented spatial region and interacting according to the dynamics of Covid-19. In addition, we include mobile and partial health barriers, and different mobility regimes. Our results show that, partial quarantines would not be effective in general, to reduce the peak of active individuals infected with the virus, except for some proportions of territorial area involved in the division of the global region. Another interesting result of our research is that the passage restrictions in a sanitary barrier would not be relevant to the impact of the pandemic indicators in a sanitary quarantine regime. A possible explanation for the ineffectiveness of partial quarantines lies in the fact that the sanitary barriers are permeable to infected individuals and therefore when one of these individuals passes, an outbreak occurs in the virus-free zone that is independent of the original one.