Growth Rate and Acceleration Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic Reveals the Effect of Public Health Measures in Real Time
subject: mathematical modeling, Hidden Markov Model, coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome, growth curve analysis, moving regression
description: Background: Ending the COVID-19 pandemic is arguably one of the most prominent challenges in recent human history. Following closely the growth dynamics of the disease is one of the pillars toward achieving that goal.Objective: We aimed at developing a simple framework to facilitate the analysis of the growth rate (cases/day) and growth acceleration (cases/day2) of COVID-19 cases in real-time.Methods: The framework was built using the Moving Regression (MR) technique and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The dynamics of the pandemic was initially modeled via combinations of four different growth stages: lagging (beginning of the outbreak), exponential (rapid growth), deceleration (growth decay), and stationary (near zero growth). A fifth growth behavior, namely linear growth (constant growth above zero), was further introduced to add more flexibility to the framework. An R Shiny application was developed, which can be accessed at https://theguarani.com.br/ or downloaded from https://github.com/adamtaiti/SARS-CoV-2. The framework was applied to data from the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which comprised 3,722,128 cases reported worldwide as of May 8th 2020.Results: We found that the impact of public health measures on the prevalence of COVID-19 could be perceived in seemingly real-time by monitoring growth acceleration curves. Restriction to human mobility produced detectable decline in growth acceleration within 1 week, deceleration within ~2 weeks and near-stationary growth within ~6 weeks. Countries exhibiting different permutations of the five growth stages indicated that the evolution of COVID-19 prevalence is more complex and dynamic than previously appreciated.Conclusions: These results corroborate that mass social isolation is a highly effective measure against the dissemination of SARS-CoV-2, as previously suggested. Apart from the analysis of prevalence partitioned by country, the proposed framework is easily applicable to city, stat…
creator: Silvana de Cássia Paulan, José Fernando Garcia, Yuri Tani Utsunomiya, Marco Milanesi, Adam Taiti Harth Utsunomiya, Rafaela Beatriz Pintor Torrecilha
source: Frontiers in Medicine
publisher: Frontiers Media S.A.
date: 2020
identifier: DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2020.00247
coverage: Medicine (General)