Integral Model of COVID-19 Spread and Mitigation in UK: Identification of Transmission Rate

ABSTRACT

The integral model with finite memory is employed to analyze the time-line of COVID-19 epidemic in the United Kingdom and government actions to miti-gate it. The model uses a realistic infection distribution. The time-varying transmission rate is determined from Volterra integral equation of the first kind. The authors construct and justify an efficient regularization algorithm for finding the transmission rate. The model and algorithm are approbated on the UK data with several waves of COVID-19 and demonstrate a remarkable resemblance between real and simulated dynamics. The timing of government preventive measures and their impact on the epidemic dynamics are discussed. © The Author(s).