The global COVID-19 pandemic at a crossroads: relevant countermeasures and ways ahead

Background: Since the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan, China at the beginning of December 2019, there have been over 11,200,000 confirmed cases in the world as of the 3rd July 2020, affecting over 213 countries and regions with nearly 530,000 deaths. The pandemic has been sweeping all continents, North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East and South Asia among others at an alarming rapidity. Here, we provide an estimate of the scale of the pandemic spread under different scenarios of variation in key influencing parameters with a hybrid model. Methods: We developed a new hybrid model of infectious disease transmission based on Cellular Automata (CA)-configured SEIR to analyse the COVID-19 outbreak and estimate its transmission pattern. A probabilistic contamination network is embedded in the pandemic transmission model to capture the randomness feature of person-to-person spread of the novel virus. We used the improved SEIR model to quantify the population contact state with isolation measures under different continuous time series contact probability via CA. We adjusted the modelling parameters to verify the model performance in accordance to the data from the reports published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. We simulated several scenarios by varying such key parameters as number of isolation rate, average contact times of the population, number of infected people before taking prevention and control measures, medical level and number of imported cases. Results: In the baseline model, we identified that the isolation control as the most influencing factor that had the largest impact on decreasing the speed of the reproductive number, accelerating the arrival of the "inflection point" of pandemic prevention and control, and the death rate reduction. We estimated that the probability of people contacts and the number of the onset infected cases before prevention measures also had significant effect on the infection rate reduction with appropriate prevention measures adoption, which partly reflects the impact of timely measure on the severity of the outbreak. We found that imported cases will risk the domestic prevention. Conclusions: Our modelling results clearly indicate that early-stage preventive measures are the most effective way to contain the pandemic spread and a strong interventionist approach needs to be adopted by policymakers vis-a-vis of the highly contagious nature of the COVID-19. Human resources, intensified isolation and confinement as well as special hospital buildings should be prioritised in countries with large number of infections to constrain the global transmission of the virulent infection. To do so, internationally coordinated actions require to be taken to replicate good practices to less infected countries and regions immediately.