A spatial epidemic model with contact and mobility restrictions

Several spatiotemporal epidemic models have described how contact and mobility restrictions have a dynamic effect on morbidity and mortality of fast transmitting pathogens in epidemics. Despite this, there have been rather limited contributions looking at policy optimization. This work combines a new spatiotemporal epidemic model of a heterogeneous mixed population located at different places with an optimal control approach to show the effects of contact and mobility restrictions under policy optimization. The objective of optimization not only includes epidemiological but also socio-economic implications of the restrictions. Several scenarios are numerically investigated, and the dependence of the optimal policy on some basic epidemiological parameters is analysed. The results illustrate the strong impact of spatial heterogeneity on optimal policy measures. An analysis of the stability of the disease-free equilibrium of the model is also presented.