Modeling the COVID-19 transmission
Abstract
I will present the dynamics of the novel coronavirus infectious disease (COVID-19) transmission. The coronavirus is highly contagious and transmissible, so that it was believed that the number of infected people increases exponentially. This is the consequence of the standard traditional model of infectious diseases, so-called the susceptible-infected-removed (SIR) model. In the SIR model, infected people increase until the herd immunity is achieved. However, as shown in observed data, this was not the case for COVID-19 spread, where the secondary and higher transmission were suppressed. To understand this transmission mechanism, we proposed a new compartmental model, what is called the broken-link model, which is motivated by a many-body screening effect, e.g., Debye screening. In my presentation, after a brief review of the SIR model, I will discuss (1) how we measure the spread speed from the data, (2) how we model the spread dynamics, and (3) how the model works for COVID-19 from viewpoints of mathematics and physics.