Estimating the Growth Rate and Doubling Time for Short-Term Prediction and Monitoring Trend During the COVID-19 Pandemic with a SAS Macro

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Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has spread around the world causing tremendous stress to the US health care system. Knowing the trend of the COVID-19 pandemic is critical for the federal and local governments and health care system to prepare plans. Our aim was to develop an approach and create a SAS macro to estimate the growth rate and doubling time in days if growth rate is positive or half time in days if growth rate is negative. We fit a series of growth curves using a rolling approach. This approach was applied to the hospitalization data of Colorado State during March 13 th and April 13 th . The growth rate was 0.18 (95% CI=(0.11, 0.24)) and the doubling time was 5 days (95% CI= (4, 7)) for the period of March 13 th -March 19 th ; the growth rate reached to the minimum −0.19 (95% CI= (−0.29, −0.10)) and the half time was 4 days (95% CI= (2, 6)) for the period of April 2 nd – April 8 th . This approach can be used for regional short-term prediction and monitoring the regional trend of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.08.20057943: (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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