Motivated by China’s experience of using Fangcang shelter hospitals (FSHs) to successfully combat the epidemic in its initial stages, we present a two-stage, functional differential delay model considering the average waiting time of patients’ admission to study the impact of hospital beds and centralized quarantine on mitigating and control of the outbreak. We compute the basic reproduction number in terms of the hospital resources, and perform a sensitivity analysis of the average waiting times of patients before admission to the hospitals. We discuss the rôle played by FSHs in mitigating and eventually curbing the epidemic.

Jacques Bélair is Full Professor in the Department of mathematics and statistics at Université de Montréal. He has a PhD in applied mathematics from Cornell University and he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physiology at McGill University. He has served as associate director of the Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) and vice-dean of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at Université de Montréal, President of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS) and co-chaired the Organizing Committee of the Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) in 2019. His research intersts revolve aound mathematical modeling of dynamic regulatory processes in biology: in the past, cardiac arrhythmias and motor control, presently, blood cell production (hematopoiesis) and the propagation of infectious diseases in general, currently SARS-Cov2 and other respiratory viruses.

He was a member of the Canadian Mathematical Modeling of COVID-19 Task Force, and is currently involved in the Canadian Emerging and Infectious Diseases Modeling Networks "One Health Modelling Network for Emerging Infections" and "Mathematics of Public Health", and serves as co-director for the Canadian Centre for Disease Modelling.