Control of COVID-19 Outbreak for Preventing Collapse of Healthcare Capacity based on Social Distancing, Confinement and Testing-Quarantining

Abstract

This work is a contribution to the call to TheIFAC-CSS Corona Control Community Project in February2020. Scientific evidence to the effectiveness of the three mainnon-pharmacological tools to mitigate a pandemic is given. Acontrol system to control the Covid-19 outbreak caused by theSars-CoV2 virus, called Coronavirus, is proposed, forpreventing collapse of the health systems and saturation ofIntensive Therapy Units (ITUs) capacity. The proposed systemis based on the three existing non-pharmacological tools for themitigation of epidemics and pandemics: social distancing,confinement and testing with isolation of a population in whichthere is community circulation of the virus. Both in the analysisand in the design of the control system, the mathematicalmodel SEIRD (Susceptible - Exposed - Infected - Recovered -Deceased) is used, which describes the dynamics of a pandemic,adjusted in this work to the behavior in space and time of theSars-CoV2. In this work the incidence and impact of testingwith isolation (or testing-quarantining) is incorporated in themodel. The proposed control system uses, as a feedback signal,the demanded quantity of critical beds and ITUs, which iscompared with the available beds capacity to generate theerror signal as input to a PID controller. As control actions,five Phases of Social Distancing and Confinement (SD&C) areproposed, which must be applied by the public authority. Thecontrol system thus generates a SD&C decision sequence orpolicy, which can be applied once a week or every fortnight.Simulation results showing the practical feasibility and goodperformance of the proposed control system are given,preventing collapse of Healthcare Capacity based on SocialDistancing, Confinement and Testing-quarantining as controlactions.