Fig. 13

The time courses of our curve flattening index for Israel, South Africa and England are plotted over the period March to July, 2020. This index is the proportion of susceptibles in disease class S\(_\text{r}\) over time (see Eq. 1) and, as such, is 0 if none of the susceptibles have taken measures to reduce the rate of SARS-CoV-2 transmission through social distancing, mask wearing or other suitable actions. On the other hand, this index is 1 when all individuals in the population have take precautions to reduce the risk of transmission by an order of magnitude (corresponding to the fact that we have set the Contact rate reduction parameter in the model to \(\delta _\text{con}=0.1\)—see Table 1)