RESUMO
With COVID-19 surging across the world, understanding the effectiveness of intervention strategies on transmission dynamics is of primary global health importance. Here, we develop and analyze an epidemiological compartmental model using multi-objective genetic algorithm design optimization to compare scenarios related to strategy type, the extent of social distancing, time window, and personal protection levels on the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 in São Paulo, Brazil. The results indicate that the optimal strategy for São Paulo is to reduce social distancing over time with a stepping-down reduction in the magnitude of social distancing every 80-days. Our results also indicate that the ability to reduce social distancing depends on a 5-10% increase in the current percentage of people strictly following protective guidelines, highlighting the importance of protective behavior in controlling the pandemic. Our framework can be extended to model transmission dynamics for other countries, regions, states, cities, and organizations.