Submitted:
01 April 2020
Posted:
06 April 2020
You are already at the latest version
Preprints on COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2
Abstract
COVID-19 severity is heterogeneously distributed over age strata, but current mitigation strategies are homogeneously applied to all population. Social-distancing and stay-home are effective conservative approaches but lack economic sustainability on long term. Conversely, herd-immunity is a nonrestrictive strategy which can cost remarkable number of human lives and can melt the healthcare system down. Here I propose an Age Adaptive Social Distancing (AASD) engineering strategy to mitigate COVID-19 outbreak. AASD is based on the scientific evidence that the fatality rate grows nonlinearly with age, hence also the containing strategy should adapt nonlinearly. Essentially, AASD suggests that ‘silent spreaders’ (age 0-39) should avoid/minimize direct and indirect contacts with individuals in ‘dangerous zone’ (age 40+). The rationale is: 0-19 should follow parents strategy, healthy 20-39 (low fatality rate) might conduct screened life under active surveillance, to sustain economy and acquire rational immunity; 40-59 should respect social distancing (waiting a therapy); 60+ should stay at home (waiting a vaccine). This might save human lives, reduce healthcare demand and improve economic sustainability. The final take-home message is that future studies should design precision and personalized strategies for specific contagious diseases that integrate different social constrains, active surveillance and contact tracing.
Keywords:
mitigation strategy
; COVID-19
; epidemics
; health policy
; public and global health
; demographics
; social distancing
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
