A Simulation of a COVID-19 Epidemic Based on a Deterministic SEIR Model

An epidemic disease caused by a new coronavirus has spread in Northern Italy with a strong contagion rate. We implement an SEIR model to compute the infected population and the number of casualties of this epidemic. The example may ideally regard the situation in the Italian Region of Lombardy, where the epidemic started on February 24, but by no means attempts to perform a rigorous case study in view of the lack of suitable data and the uncertainty of the different parameters, namely, the variation of the degree of home isolation and social distancing as a function of time, the initial number of exposed individuals and infected people, the incubation and infectious periods, and the fatality rate. First, we perform an analysis of the results of the model by varying the parameters and initial conditions (in order for the epidemic to start, there should be at least one exposed or one infectious human). Then, we consider the Lombardy case and calibrate the model with the number of dead in...