A Mitigation Score for COVID-19

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, normalized mitigation score for COVID-19 that uses smoothing techniques to provide robust, comparable insights into infection control effectiveness across different regions.

Contribution

It presents a novel mitigation score that normalizes and smooths COVID-19 case data, enabling effective comparison and clearer understanding of mitigation impacts.

Findings

The score effectively normalizes data across jurisdictions.

Smoothing enhances robustness against reporting inconsistencies.

The score provides clearer insights for decision makers.

Abstract

This note describes a simple score to indicate the effectiveness of mitigation against infections of COVID-19 as observed by new case counts. The score includes normalization, making comparisons across jurisdictions possible. The smoothing employed provides robustness in the face of reporting vagaries while retaining salient features of evolution, enabling a clearer picture for decision makers and the public.