Ascertaining the initiation of epidemic resurgences: an application to the COVID-19 second surges in Europe and the Northeast United States

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Abstract

Assessing a potential resurgence of an epidemic outbreak with certainty is as important as it is challenging. The low number of infectious individuals after a long regression, and the randomness associated with it, makes it difficult to ascertain whether the infectious population is growing or just fluctuating. We have developed an approach to compute confidence intervals for the switching time from decay to growth and to compute the corresponding multiple-location aggregated quantities over a region to increase the precision of the determination. We estimated the aggregate prevalence over time for Europe and the northeast United States to characterize the COVID-19 second surge in these regions during year 2020. We find a starting date as early as 3 July (95% confidence interval (CI): 1–6 July) for Europe and 19 August (95% CI: 16–23 August) for the northeast United States; subsequent infectious populations that, as of 31 December, have always increased or remained stagnant; and the resurgences being the collective effect of each overall region with no location, either country or state, dominating the regional dynamics by itself.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.01.02.21249125: (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: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    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.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


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


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

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