Multinational modeling of SARS-CoV-2 spreading dynamics: Insights on the heterogeneity of COVID-19 transmission and its potential healthcare burden
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Abstract
Background
Modelling and projections of COVID-19 using a single set of transmission parameters can be an elaborated because the application of different levels of containment measures at different stages of the worldwide COVID-19 outbreak.
Methods
We developed a piecewise fitting SEIR methodology to fit the progress of the COVID-19 that can be applied on any of the 185 countries listed in John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The contagious contact rate, the rate of removal and the initially exposed population were obtained at three different stages of the pandemic for a set of 18 countries, and globally for the total number of cases worldwide. The active number of infections and the removed populations were fitted simultaneously to validate the SEIR model against the available time series reports on the number of confirmed infections, recoveries and deaths. We evaluate the effect of a reduction of contagious contact rate on the level of burden put on local healthcare infrastructure considering different levels of intervention. As a guideline for future public health interventions, we also estimated the maximum number of future cases and its potential peak date.
Findings
We project that the peak in the number of infections worldwide will take place after the third quarter of 2020 with a decline rate that might extend beyond 2020. For 12 out of the 18 countries analyzed, we observe that, following the trend at the date of this study, the number of severe infections will surpass their healthcare capacity. For a 90% reduction scenario of the contagious contact rate, four out of the 18 countries analyzed will undergo a significant delay in the peak of infection, extending the course of the epidemic further than our simulation window (365 days).
Interpretation
We identify three stages for the COVID-19 transmission dynamics, which suggest that it is highly heterogeneous between countries and its contagious contact rate, is currently affected by both local responses of the public health interventions and to the population’s adherence to the measures.
Funding
No funding received.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.14.20064956: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, some limitations to our analysis can significantly influence the model predictions. For instance, our analysis does not consider the fact that the number of confirmed cases could be underestimated (accordingly to official reports). Some countries such as South Korea, Germany and to some extent the US have enacted massive testing which has shown benefits in reporting the spread of the disease,38 whilst others countries such as …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.14.20064956: (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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:However, some limitations to our analysis can significantly influence the model predictions. For instance, our analysis does not consider the fact that the number of confirmed cases could be underestimated (accordingly to official reports). Some countries such as South Korea, Germany and to some extent the US have enacted massive testing which has shown benefits in reporting the spread of the disease,38 whilst others countries such as Mexico have enacted a proper sentinel surveillance model because of effectiveness in tracking outbreaks in other respiratory virus infections.39 It is noteworthy to mention that using only the official reported numbers our model lessens the effect of methodological biases introduced by curating local reporting approaches. An underestimation in the number of active infections arising from the use of potentially under-sampled data40 could lead to offsets in our forecasted peak date and in the expected number of peak infections. A second limitation of our approach is that, in contrast with Bayesian models, no prior distribution for constraining the parameter values to a credible interval is used when fitting the models; this might decrease the precision of the estimations in countries with limited data due to a lag in the pandemic’s spread. Because the model parameters were loosely bounded (see Methods), the basic reproduction number obtained for some countries do not precisely agree with other reports for the early onset (see Supplementary Informa...
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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