# Optimal Lockdown for Pandemic Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.12923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Oct 2020.

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## Abstract (arXiv)

As a common strategy of contagious disease containment, lockdowns will inevitably weaken the economy. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic underscores the trade-off arising from public health and economic cost. An optimal lockdown policy to resolve this trade-off is highly desired. Here we propose a mathematical framework of pandemic control through an optimal stabilizing non-uniform lockdown, where our goal is to reduce the economic activity as little as possible while decreasing the number of infected individuals at a prescribed rate. This framework allows us to efficiently compute the optimal stabilizing lockdown policy for general epidemic spread models, including both the classical SIS/SIR/SEIR models and a new model of COVID-19 transmissions. We demonstrate the power of this framework by analyzing publicly available data of inter-county travel frequencies to analyze a model of COVID-19 spread in the 62 counties of New York State. We find that an optimal stabilizing lockdown based on epidemic status in April 2020 would have reduced economic activity more stringently outside of New York City compared to within it, even though the epidemic was much more prevalent in New York City at that point. Such a counterintuitive result highlights the intricacies of pandemic control and sheds light on future lockdown policy design.