• Jonas Dehning, Johannes Zierenberg, F Paul Spitzner, Michael Wibral, Joao Pinheiro Neto, Michael Wilczek, and Viola Priesemann.
• Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, 37077 Göttingen, Germany.
• Science. 2020 Jul 10; 369 (6500).

AbstractAs coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is rapidly spreading across the globe, short-term modeling forecasts provide time-critical information for decisions on containment and mitigation strategies. A major challenge for short-term forecasts is the assessment of key epidemiological parameters and how they change when first interventions show an effect. By combining an established epidemiological model with Bayesian inference, we analyzed the time dependence of the effective growth rate of new infections. Focusing on COVID-19 spread in Germany, we detected change points in the effective growth rate that correlate well with the times of publicly announced interventions. Thereby, we could quantify the effect of interventions and incorporate the corresponding change points into forecasts of future scenarios and case numbers. Our code is freely available and can be readily adapted to any country or region.Copyright © 2020 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works.

14 keywords...

hide…