The COVID-19 Omicron Wave in the Framework of a New Mathematical Modeling in Few European Countries and the Right Time for Lifting Restrictions

Abstract

Objectives: The COVID-19 Omicron wave in Romania, Bulgaria and Germany is considered in retrospective till begin of March 2022. The aim is to describe both country specific features and common trends related the same underlying pathogen as well as to compare shortly the results and derived parameters to those from a similar application to few strongly affected countries in the beginning of 2022: the USA, the UK and France.

Methods: The main novelty of the approach used to describe the Pandemic is the dynamical tracking of successive generations of infected people instead of treating in time the evolution of few large compartments within which the total population is partitioned.

Results: The daily observed new infection cases are described over a large time scale in a reasonable way after normalization and the derived model parameters in all cases are consistent. The position of the calculated Pandemic peaks in time in Romania and Bulgaria indicates a transition from the second to the third generation of infected people while in the larger countries the transition is from the third to the fourth generation.

Conclusions: The rapidly acquired temporary immunity and vaccination effects reinforced the expectation of eventually control/stop the COVID-19 Pandemic soon. However, lifting restrictions should have been done carefully and country specifically, and of course at the right time. Later developments after March 2022 have shown that the expectations were too optimistic and Omicron waves generated by another virus sub-variants did complicate the situation.