AUTHOR=Bouchnita Anass , Chekroun Abdennasser , Jebrane Aissam 

TITLE=Mathematical Modeling Predicts That Strict Social Distancing Measures Would Be Needed to Shorten the Duration of Waves of COVID-19 Infections in Vietnam

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 8 - 2020

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2020.559693

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2020.559693

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic that emerged in Wuhan, China and spread throughout the world since then. As a result, it has caused a major threat to global public health. In this paper, we use mathematical modelling to analyze the reported data of COVID-19 cases in Vietnam and study the impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions. To achieve this, two models are used to describe the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. The first model belongs to the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (SEIR) type and is used to compute the basic reproduction number. The second model adopts a multi-scale approach which explicitly integrates the movement of each individual. Numerical simulations are conducted to quantify the effects of social distancing measures on the spread of COVID-19 in the urban areas of Vietnam. Both models show that the adoption of relaxed social distancing measures reduces the number of infected cases but does not shorten the duration of the epidemic waves. Whereas more strict measures would lead to the containment of each epidemic wave in one month and a half.