Spatiotemporal dynamics in demography-sensitive disease transmission: COVID-19 spread in NY as a case study

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic cellular automata model that incorporates demographic and spatiotemporal population dynamics to improve predictions of COVID-19 spread, demonstrated through a case study in New York.

Contribution

The novel model accounts for demographic factors and population dynamics, enhancing the accuracy of disease transmission predictions over traditional epidemiological models.

Findings

Extended lockdowns up to 180 days can prevent a second wave.

Increased testing reduces infection numbers even with relaxed social distancing.

Demography-aware modeling improves outbreak prediction accuracy.

Abstract

The rapid transmission of the highly contagious novel coronavirus has been represented through several data-guided approaches across targeted geographies, in an attempt to understand when the pandemic will be under control and imposed lockdown measures can be relaxed. However, these epidemiological models predominantly based on training data employing number of cases and fatalities are limited in that they do not account for the spatiotemporal population dynamics that principally contributes to the disease spread. Here, a stochastic cellular automata enabled predictive model is presented that is able to accurate describe the effect of demography-dependent population dynamics on disease transmission. Using the spread of coronavirus in the state of New York as a case study, results from the computational framework remarkably agree with the actual count for infected cases and deaths as reported across organizations. The predictions suggest that an extended lockdown in some form, for up to 180 days, can significantly reduce the risk of a second wave of the outbreak. In addition, increased availability of medical testing is able to reduce the number of infected patients, even when less stringent social distancing guidelines and imposed. Equipping this stochastic approach with demographic factors such as age ratio, pre-existing health conditions, robustifies the model to predict the transmittivity of future outbreaks before they transform into an epidemic.