COVIDHunter: COVID-19 pandemic wave prediction and mitigation via seasonality-aware modeling

TL;DR

COVIDHunter is a flexible, seasonality-aware simulation model that predicts COVID-19 spread and guides mitigation strategies by considering environmental factors, variants, and vaccination rates, demonstrated through a Swiss case study.

Contribution

It introduces COVIDHunter, a novel simulation model that accurately predicts COVID-19 metrics and evaluates mitigation measures considering external environmental factors.

Findings

COVIDHunter accurately predicts daily cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.

The model estimates a new deadly wave peaking on 26 January 2022 in Switzerland.

Policy recommendation: increase mitigation measures for 30 days.

Abstract

Early detection and isolation of COVID-19 patients are essential for successful implementation of mitigation strategies and eventually curbing the disease spread. With a limited number of daily COVID-19 tests performed in every country, simulating the COVID-19 spread along with the potential effect of each mitigation strategy currently remains one of the most effective ways in managing the healthcare system and guiding policy-makers. We introduce COVIDHunter, a flexible and accurate COVID-19 outbreak simulation model that evaluates the current mitigation measures that are applied to a region, predicts COVID-19 statistics (the daily number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths), and provides suggestions on what strength the upcoming mitigation measure should be. The key idea of COVIDHunter is to quantify the spread of COVID-19 in a geographical region by simulating the average number of new infections caused by an infected person considering the effect of external factors, such as environmental conditions (e.g., climate, temperature, humidity), different variants of concern, vaccination rate, and mitigation measures. Using Switzerland as a case study, COVIDHunter estimates that we are experiencing a deadly new wave that will peak on 26 January 2022, which is very similar in numbers to the wave we had in February 2020. The policy-makers have only one choice that is to increase the strength of the currently applied mitigation measures for 30 days. Unlike existing models, the COVIDHunter model accurately monitors and predicts the daily number of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths due to COVID-19. Our model is flexible to configure and simple to modify for modeling different scenarios under different environmental conditions and mitigation measures. We release the source code of the COVIDHunter implementation at https://github.com/CMU-SAFARI/COVIDHunter.