Timing social distancing to avert unmanageable COVID-19 hospital surges.

ABSTRACT: Following the April 16, 2020 release of the Opening Up America Again guidelines for relaxing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) social distancing policies, local leaders are concerned about future pandemic waves and lack robust strategies for tracking and suppressing transmission. Here, we present a strategy for triggering short-term shelter-in-place orders when hospital admissions surpass a threshold. We use stochastic optimization to derive triggers that ensure hospital surges will not exceed local capacity and lockdowns are as short as possible. For example, Austin, Texas-the fastest-growing large city in the United States-has adopted a COVID-19 response strategy based on this method. Assuming that the relaxation of social distancing increases the risk of infection sixfold, the

SUBMITTER: Duque D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7443931 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature