Simulation of COVID-19 propagation scenarios in the Madrid metropolitan area

This work presents simulation results for different mitigation and confinement scenarios for the propagation of COVID-19 in the metropolitan area of Madrid. These scenarios were implemented and tested using EpiGraph, an epidemic simulator which has been extended to simulate COVID-19 propagation. EpiGraph implements a social interaction model, which realistically captures a large number of characteristics of individuals and groups, as well as their individual interconnections, which are extracted from connection patterns in social networks. Besides the epidemiological and social interaction components, it also models people's short and long-distance movements as part of a transportation model. These features, together with the capacity to simulate scenarios with millions of individuals and apply different contention and mitigation measures, gives EpiGraph the potential to reproduce the COVID-19 evolution and study medium-term effects of the virus when applying mitigation methods. EpiGraph, obtains closely aligned infected and death curves related to the first wave in the Madrid metropolitan area, achieving similar seroprevalence values. We also show that selective lockdown for people over 60 would reduce the number of deaths. In addition, evaluate the effect of the use of face masks after the first wave, which shows that the percentage of people that comply with mask use is a crucial factor for mitigating the infection's spread.This work has been supported by the Spanish Instituto de Salud Carlos III under the project grant 2020/00183/001 Medium and long-term forecast of the spread of COVID-19, the project grant BCV-2020-3-0008 Simulating COVID-19 propagation at a European-level of the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES), and the EU project 'ASPIDE: Exascale Programming Models for Extreme Data Processing under grant 801091. The role of both funders was limited to financial support and did not imply participation of any kind in the study and collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, nor in the writing of the manuscript