COVID-19 spreading in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Do the policies of social isolation really work?

The recent Coronavirus has been spreading through all the world fastly. In this work we focus on the evolution of the COVID-19 in one of the most populous Brazilian states, namely the Rio de Janeiro state. The first case was reported in March 5, 2020, thus we have a considerable amount of available data to make a good analysis. We study the dynamics of COVID-19 through a Susceptible-Infectious-Quarantined-Recovered (SIQR) model with an additional mechanism that represents the implementation of public policies of social isolation. Based on the data collected from the Rio de Janeiro state Department of Health from March 5, 2020 through April 26, 2020, we observed that the implementation of social distancing policies changed the initial exponential growth to a sub-exponential one. The SIQR model with the above-mentioned mechanism is capable of reproducing the data of confirmed cases in Rio de Janeiro, and it explains how that change occurred. The model also predicts an important mitigation effect, namely the flattening effect, i.e., the considerably decrease of the maximum number of confirmed cases. Through the results of the model, this effect can be directly related to the social isolation policies. Finally, we consider the relaxation of such policies, and discuss about the ideal period of time to release people to return to their activities. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd