• Hyokyoung G Hong and Yi Li.
• Department of Statistics and Probability, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, United States of America.
• Plos One. 2020 Jan 1; 15 (7): e0236464.

AbstractThe coronavirus pandemic has rapidly evolved into an unprecedented crisis. The susceptible-infectious-removed (SIR) model and its variants have been used for modeling the pandemic. However, time-independent parameters in the classical models may not capture the dynamic transmission and removal processes, governed by virus containment strategies taken at various phases of the epidemic. Moreover, few models account for possible inaccuracies of the reported cases. We propose a Poisson model with time-dependent transmission and removal rates to account for possible random errors in reporting and estimate a time-dependent disease reproduction number, which may reflect the effectiveness of virus control strategies. We apply our method to study the pandemic in several severely impacted countries, and analyze and forecast the evolving spread of the coronavirus. We have developed an interactive web application to facilitate readers' use of our method.

15 keywords...

hide…