Outbreak of Covid-19 worldwide is on the decline -----Recurrent Neural Reinforcement Learning and Health Interventions to Curb the Spread of Covid-19 in the world

  1. Qiyang Ge
  2. Zixin Hu
  3. Kai Zhang
  4. Shudi Li
  5. Wei Lin
  6. Li Jin
  7. Momiao Xiong

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Abstract

As the Covid-19 pandemic soars around the world, there is urgent need to forecast the expected number of cases worldwide and the length of the pandemic before receding and implement public health interventions for significantly stopping the spread of Covid-19. Widely used statistical and computer methods for modeling and forecasting the trajectory of Covid-19 are epidemiological models. Although these epidemiological models are useful for estimating the dynamics of transmission of epidemics, their prediction accuracies are quite low. Alternative to the epidemiological models, the reinforcement learning (RL) and causal inference emerge as a powerful tool to select optimal interventions for worldwide containment of Covid-19. Therefore, we formulated real-time forecasting and evaluation of multiple public health intervention problems into off-policy evaluation (OPE) and counterfactual outcome forecasting problems and integrated RL and recurrent neural network (RNN) for exploring public health intervention strategies to slow down the spread of Covid-19 worldwide, given the historical data that may have been generated by different public health intervention policies. We applied the developed methods to real data collected from January 22, 2020 to July 30, 2020 for real-time forecasting the confirmed cases of Covid-19 across the world. We observed that the number of new cases of Covid-19 worldwide reached a peak (407,205) on July 24, 2020 and forecasted that the number of laboratory-confirmed cumulative cases of Covid-19 will pass 20 million as of August 22, 2020. The results showed that outbreak of Covid-19 worldwide has peaked and is on the decline

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.07.08.20149146: (What is this?)

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    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).

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.08.20149146v2 on medRxiv
  3. Version published to 10.1101/2020.07.08.20149146v1 on medRxiv