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Mobility researchers from the TU Berlin warn against exhausting the relaxation of crown measures during the Christmas holidays. According to the model calculations for the city of Berlin on the basis of anonymized mobile phone data, the consequence of this is that the number of infections will increase slightly again in January before falling again, despite the stricter measures.
However, if the people of Berlin come into greater contact with other people at Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the number of infections can be expected to increase significantly again.
“Then hospitals will reach their capacity limits and the lockdown will probably have to continue until April to reduce the number of infections to a level where health authorities can locate them,” said Kai Nagel, mobility researcher at TU Berlin. Under this scenario, daily new infections in Berlin would not fall below 1000 again until March.
Only below critical value again in April
But even if people only meet more frequently on Christmas, you can only expect a 7-day incidence of less than 50 per 100,000 residents in April. Without a meeting over the holidays and New Year’s Eve, the numbers would drop in January and February and fall below the critical limit of 50 during March.
[Jeden Tag bringen wir Sie mit unseren „Fragen des Tages“ auf den aktuellen Stand. Den kostenlosen Newsletter können Sie per Mail bestellen. Zur Anmeldung geht es hier.]“Even if the population largely refrains from private meetings during the holidays, it will be at least until the spring before contact tracing becomes fully effective again,” is Nagel’s assessment. “If the holiday rules are so exhausted that five people from two households meet again and again for several days, the number of infections will increase significantly and not decrease.”
Nagel explains that the light-blocking measures in early November only caused the number of infections to stagnate, saying that mobility restrictions were only half as severe as in spring and that schools had largely remained open.
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Researchers led by Kai Nagel are modeling the infection process in Berlin on the basis of cellular network movement data as part of the “Modus-Covid” project, which is funded by the Federal Research Ministry.
Simulation adapted to reality
They have developed a model that has a simulation for every day of the week for all people of when, where and how people move, where they are and what activities they do there.
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Several model parameters simulate the available measurements and can be varied over time and adapted to reality.
“In our simulations, for example, we can calculate the effects of holidays and school closings, what it means when everyday masks are worn continuously, or how a reduction in activities at home affects the reproductive number R” explained Ricardo Ewert of Nagels. Team. The reproduction number R indicates how many people are infected on average by one infected person.
