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Extracting the effective contact rate of COVID-19 pandemic

In the absence of any available vaccines or drugs, prevention of the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is being achieved by putting many mitigation measures in place. It is indispensable to have robust and reliable ways of evaluating the effectiveness of these measures. In this work, we assume that, at a very coarse-grained level of description, the overall effect of all the mitigation measures is that we can still describe the spread of the pandemic using the most basic Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Removed ($SEIR$) model but with an "effective contact rate" ($β$) which is time-dependent. We then use the time series data of the number of infected individuals in the population to extract the instantaneous effective contact rate which is the result of various social interventions put in place. This approach has the potential to be significantly useful while evaluating the impact of mitigation measures on the spread of COVID-19 in near future.