Forecasting the spread of COVID-19 under different reopening strategies

  1. Meng Liu
  2. Raphael Thomadsen
  3. Song Yao

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Abstract

We combine COVID-19 case data with mobility data to estimate a modified susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model in the United States. In contrast to a standard SIR model, we find that the incidence of COVID-19 spread is concave in the number of infectious individuals, as would be expected if people have inter-related social networks. This concave shape has a significant impact on forecasted COVID-19 cases. In particular, our model forecasts that the number of COVID-19 cases would only have an exponential growth for a brief period at the beginning of the contagion event or right after a reopening, but would quickly settle into a prolonged period of time with stable, slightly declining levels of disease spread. This pattern is consistent with observed levels of COVID-19 cases in the US, but inconsistent with standard SIR modeling. We forecast rates of new cases for COVID-19 under different social distancing norms and find that if social distancing is eliminated there will be a massive increase in the cases of COVID-19.

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  1. Version published to 10.1038/s41598-020-77292-8
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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113993: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code and data.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

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    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

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    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.26.20113993 on medRxiv