A quantitative framework for exploring exit strategies from the COVID-19 lockdown

Following the highly restrictive measures adopted by many countries for combating the current pandemic, the number of individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 and the associated number of deaths steadily decreased. This fact, together with the impossibility of maintaining the lockdown indefinitely, raises the crucial question of whether it is possible to design an exit strategy based on quantitative analysis. Guided by rigorous mathematical results, we show that this is indeed possible: we present a robust numerical algorithm which can compute the cumulative number of deaths that will occur as a result of increasing the number of contacts by a given multiple, using as input only the most reliable of all data available during the lockdown, namely the cumulative number of deaths. (c) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.