Privacy-Preserving-Enabled Lightweight COVID-19 Simulation Model for Mobile Intelligent Application

In order to control the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many models have shown effectiveness in predicting the spread of new coronary pneumonia and the different interventions. However, few models can collect large amounts of high-quality real-time data faster under the premise of protecting privacy, considering the impact of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant and the mass vaccination program as a new intervention. Therefore, we developed a mobile intelligent application that can collect a large amount of real-time data while protecting privacy and conducted a feasibility study by defining a new COVID-19 mathematical model SEMCVRD. By simulating different intervention measures, the prediction model of the mobile intelligent application used in this article simulates the epidemic situation in the U.K. as an example. The findings are as below: the optimal intervention strategy is to suppress the intervention at P=3 (intervention intensity: the average number of contacts per person per day) before the end of March 2021, then gradually release the intervention intensity at a rate of P+2, and finally release the intensity to P=9 in June 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic will end at the end of June 2021, when the total number of deaths will reach 128772. This strategy will be able to balance the tradeoff between loss of life and economic loss. Compared with the official statistics released by the U.K. government on May 31, 2021, our model can accurately predict the relative error rate of the total number of cases is less than 6.9%, and the relative error rate of the total number of deaths is less than 1%. Furthermore, the model is also suitable for collecting data from countries/regions around the world.