Excellent, you have in a sense rediscovered what I proposed in my post a couple or more months ago (https://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/1904319), that using delays works best - although it makes the fitting more time consuming - and you have taken it one step further. I haven't posted the notebook that makes the automatic fits, so it is good that you do! I just haven't had time. In my post I discuss (in a discussion with Robert Nachbar) why the population has to be small. An article is forthcoming.

You should make a mental note that models which fit the epidemiological data as you propose (if I understand you correctly, as you do not really discuss what your data are) are not truly epidemiological models. For that you need to consider an alternative way of fitting the data in which the detected infections are matched to the R curve of the models (since you effectively put those individuals into quarantine and remove them from the infection chain). It is also possible to do that and get good fits (you can see that in my post).

And you can make models that fit the fatalities data as well in a similar vein (I owe the explanation for this and for why it works).

By the way, you can eliminate the manual guessing of initial values for the minimization procedure by automatically honing in on the right values, to the precision you want. It takes a long time to find the values like this (4 hours in case of the simplified SIR with delay model I use the most).

Excellent job!

I do not think using I(t)*S(t) makes much sense in a locked-down environment. Might make more sense to work with log(s), as a surrogate for average number of contacts made by a person per day. This would need to be localized to e.g. city/town levels to account for differences in population densities.

Nice post! I'm glad you had better success fitting the data than I did, and the comparison of several countries with quite varied mitigation strategies is interesting.

I'm still concerned that the total population has to be made so small, and we should be able to devise a model that effectively reduces the number of susceptible individuals in a mechanistically plausible manner.

The time delays, in principle, replace the duration of infection and time to death, and therefore the rate constants [Gamma] and [Mu] shouldn't be needed. Have you tried fitting the data without them?

Looking at the summary table, [Gamma] isn't much greater that [Mu], only a factor of 15-30 for the different fits, so the equation for I should still include the term for death. Did you try modeling without making that assumption?

It seems that mathematician like to make these kinds of simplifications so that the system can be linearized, and additional statements about steady states and stability can be made more easily. With the capabilities of WL, I don't think that's necessary and we can get sufficiently accurate answers to those questions with simulation. Sometimes these simplifications are made to reduce the number of parameters, but again it's almost trivial to get sensitivities and and one can still maintain sufficient rigor in parameter fitting by making use of proper identifiability analysis.

Forgot to mention, I did try to include the mu term in the infectious equation but it was very unstable, so in the end I thought did not worth the trouble.

Thank you for the reference Christopher! I downloaded it already to check it out. I will comment further afterwards, if I can make some progress with this other approach.