Age class structure in SIRD models for the COVID-19 – An analysis of Tennessee data

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing disruptive effects on the healthcare system, economy and social life of countries all over the world. Even though the elder portion of the population is the most severely affected by the coronavirus disease, the counter-measures introduced so far by the governments do not take into account age structure, and the restrictions act uniformly on the population irrespectively of age. In this paper, we introduce a SIRD model with age classes for studying the impact on the epidemic evolution of lockdown policies applied heterogeneously on the different age groups of the population. The proposed model is then applied to COVID-19 data from the state of Tennessee. The simulation results suggest that a selective lockdown, while having a lighter socioeconomic impact, may bring benefits in terms of reduction of the mortality rate that are comparable to the ones obtained by a uniform lockdown.