Dynamics of local epidemic COVID-19 outbreak through the prism of compartment modeling

Our research goal was to tentatively assess necessary volumes and quality of statistic description necessary for describing coronavirus epidemic outbreak. We took COVID-19 epidemics development in Hubei (China) as an example and showed that an existing system of descriptive epidemiologic concepts based on lethality, mortality and the basic reproduction number can turn out to be insufficient for full-fledged description of an epidemic and prediction of its outcomes. The said province was chosen as an object for analysis at a period when the outbreak was just starting; during that period activities aimed at epidemiologic investigations and coercive limitations of contacts between people didn’t yet yield expected results. Data and methods. We revealed that more qualitative statistic description given for infectious processes in a population could be gained with a relatively simple and well-known compartment-model; deviations of actual epidemiologic observations from its parameters can be interpreted as being purely stochastic ones...