I greatly enjoyed your video presentation. It seemed that the size of the susceptible population made a big difference, which you explained as mixing being inefficient, and limiting by quarantine. I have been playing with a much simpler logistic model mainly to capture the day to day dynamics with the assumption that the epidemic can only be stopped with effective quarantine: Logistic Quarantine Model
The assumption is that the quarantine process is competing with the infection rate, but that the quarantine set can grow faster than the set of infected and exposed, such that the infected and exposed population is eventually contained in the quarantine set and that set becomes the limit to the susceptible set. I think if you incorporated this into your model, it could give a better estimate of the size of the susceptible set.
The model has worked with China. The graph below uses a very simple measure on the reported numbers. The daily differences of the log of the daily accumulated case numbers, i.e. the continuous growth rate, which should be horizontal if the number of cases grows exponentially.
The blue dots are the daily differences of log case number predicted by the logistic model on the last date of the data. Italy is shown below.
Once the actual data closes in on the predicted, the quarantine has successfully limited the susceptible population. I suspect with refinement, your model might eventually be sensitive enough to discover other dynamics. For instance did the Chinese method of quarantine to put infected people together in close quarters increase the death rate because, while the people were infected, they may not have developed much of an immune response, and the quarantine method permitted reinfection causing higher viral titers. Household quarantine also may guarantee higher infection rates of household members than if the infected person were removed from the household. In the community where I live in rural central Arizona, the population has decided to remove itself from the general population. The nearest reported infection is a hundred miles away. The Walmart and two supermarkets have been emptied and people are staying at home. Fortunately we are surrounded by three million acres of National Forest, so there is plenty of room to go hiking.
