BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 1: COVID-19 pandemics through the lens of physics (org.: Fakhteh Ghanbarnejad and Philipp Hövel)
SOE 1.8: Talk
Monday, March 22, 2021, 12:20–12:40, SOEa
A control theory approach to optimal pandemic mitigation — Prakhar Godara1, Stephan Herminghaus1,2, and •Knut Heidemann1 — 1Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany — 2Institute for the Dynamics of Complex Systems, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany
The recent outbreak of the illness COVID-19, has resulted in a pandemic with unprecedented impact on societies all over the globe. A major focus of governments is on designing containment strategies which are as mild as possible, but substantial enough to limit the severity of the outbreak in order not to overwhelm the health service system (HSS). In the framework of homogeneous susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) models, we use a control theory approach to identify optimal pandemic mitigation strategies [1]. We derive rather general conditions for reaching herd immunity while minimizing the costs incurred by the introduction of societal control measures (such as closing schools, social distancing, lockdowns, etc.), under the constraint that the infected fraction of the population does never exceed a certain maximum corresponding to public health system capacity. Optimality is derived and verified by variational and numerical methods for a number of model cost functions. The effects of immune response decay after recovery are taken into account and discussed in terms of the feasibility of strategies based on herd immunity.
[1] Prakhar Godara, Stephan Herminghaus and Knut M. Heidemann. "A control theory approach to optimal pandemic mitigation." arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.02513 (2020).