An epidemic model for COVID-19 transmission in Argentina: Exploration of the alternating quarantine and massive testing strategies

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged authorities at different levels of government administration around the globe. When faced with diseases of this severity, it is useful for the authorities to have prediction tools to estimate in advance the impact on the health system and the human, material, and economic resources that will be necessary. In this paper, we construct an extended Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered model that incorporates the social structure of Mar del Plata, the \(4^\circ\) most inhabited city in Argentina and head of the Municipality of General Pueyrredón. Moreover, we consider detailed partitions of infected individuals according to the illness severity, as well as data of local health resources, to bring these predictions closer to the local reality. Tuning the corresponding epidemic parameters for COVID-19, we study an alternating quarantine strategy, in which a part of the population can circulate without restrictions at any time, while the rest is equally divided into two groups and goes on successive periods of normal activity and lockdown, each one with a duration of \(\tau\) days. Besides, we implement a random testing strategy over the population. We found that \(\tau = 7\) is a good choice for the quarantine strategy since it matches with the weekly cycle as it reduces the infected population. Focusing on the health system, projecting from the situation as of September 30, we foresee a difficulty to avoid saturation of ICU, given the extremely low levels of mobility that would be required. In the worst case, our model estimates that four thousand deaths would occur, of which 30\% could be avoided with proper medical attention. Nonetheless, we found that aggressive testing would allow an increase in the percentage of people that can circulate without restrictions, being the equipment required to deal with the additional critical patients relatively low.