Jan C Budich, Emil J Bergholtz
Containment, aiming to prevent the epidemic stage of community-spreading altogether, and mitigation, aiming to merely 'flatten the curve' of a wide-ranged outbreak, constitute two qualitatively different approaches to combating an epidemic through non-pharmaceutical interventions. Here, we study a simple model of epidemic dynamics separating the population into two groups, namely a low-risk group and a high-risk group, for which different strategies are pursued. Due to synchronization effects, we find that maintaining a slower epidemic growth behaviour for the high-risk group is unstable against any finite coupling between the two groups...
October 25, 2021: Mathematical Medicine and Biology: a Journal of the IMA