COVID-19 outbreak in Greece has passed its rising inflection point and stepping into its peak

  1. Harris V. Georgiou

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Abstract

Since the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 is the most urgent and challenging task for the international scientific community, in order to identify its behaviour, track its progress and plan effective mitigation policies. In this study, Greece is the main focus for assessing the national outbreak and estimating the general trends and outlook of it. Multiple data analytics procedures, spectral decomposition and curve-fitting formulations are developed based on the data available at hand. Standard SIEQRDP epidemic modelling is applied for Greece and for the general region around it, providing hints for the outbreak progression in the mid- and long-term, for various infections under-reporting rates. The overall short-term outlook for Greece seems to be towards positive, with a downward trend in infections rate daily increase (i.e., now beyond the exponential growth rate), a possible peak within a few days beyond April 14th, as well as the high availability level of ICU w.r.t. expected demand at peak. On the negative side, the fade-out period seems to be in the order of several months, with high probability of recurrent surges of the outbreak. The mitigation policies for the ‘next day’ should be focused on close tracking of the epidemic via large-scale tests, strict border checking in international travelling and an adaptive plan for selective activation of mitigation measures when deemed necessary.

This study focuses on the COVID-19 outbreak in Greece and provides data-driven epidemic modelling and experimental results regarding the current state. Based on these results, the overall short-term outlook for Greece seems to be towards positive, having recently passed the rising inflection point and approaching the peak of the infections, and most probably capable of covering the projected ICU demand peak by a large margin. On the downside, the fade-out period seems to be in the order of several months, with high probability of recurrent surges of the outbreak. The ‘next day’ mitigation policies need to be carefully planned, highly adaptive and based on close tracking of the outbreak via large-scale testing in the general population.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.04.15.20066712: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    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: Please consider improving the rainbow (“jet”) colormap(s) used on page 5. At least one figure is not accessible to readers with colorblindness and/or is not true to the data, i.e. not perceptually uniform.

    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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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.04.15.20066712v1 on medRxiv