COVID-19 II

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, governments all over the world have been forced to impose emergency measures such as lockdowns leading to a severe loss in economic output. Whereas standard models assume a progressive return to equilibrium output after a shock, we discuss the impact of a Covid-like shock on a simple toy economy, described by the Mark-0 Agent-Based Model.

Physical contacts are at the core of most human interactions. These contacts form large networks of physical interactions that are guided by social, economic, and urban factors, and through which complex dynamics, from product exchange to disease spread, can occur. The characterization of these contact networks for large settings, such as a metropolitan area, is unfeasible without the use of technological approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a terrible toll in cities across the world, including Mexico City. The main transmission route of SARS-CoV-2 requires close physical contacts between people; reducing these contacts has been the basis of mitigation strategies worldwide. The mexican government instituted a federally mandated soft (voluntary) lockdown (Jornada Nacional de Sana Distancia), reducing general mobility among the population to about 25% of its original levels for the months of April and May.

Among the different indicators that quantify the spread of an epidemic such as the on-going COVID-19, stands first the reproduction number which measures how many people can be contaminated by an infected person. In order to permit the monitoring of the evolution of this number, a new estimation procedure is proposed here, assuming a well-accepted model for current incidence data, based on past observations [1].