Abstract
The spread of COVID-19 implied a large and fast increase of demand for intensive care services. To face this increase in demand, health care systems need to adapt their response by increasing hospital beds, intensive care unit (ICU) capacity and by (re-)deploying doctors and other personnel. This paper proposes a forecast approach based on the Vector Error Correction model for the daily counts of hospitalized patients with symptoms and of patients in ICU, using publicly available data on the current COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, Switzerland and Spain. The level of analysis is the local government managing the health care system response, which corresponds to regions for Italy. The one-week-ahead forecasts are validated with out-of-sample data over successive weeks; they are found to provide timely and robust prediction of ICU capacity needs in Lombardy, the most-affected Italian region, starting from the sample of the first 2 weeks of data. The same methodology is successfully validated on other Italian regions, Switzerland and Spain. This approach may be used in other countries/regions/provinces to help adapt the health care system response to COVID-19 (or other similar disease); for this purpose, the open-source software code to produce the forecasts is provided with the paper.
Highlights
The human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world, prompting the World Health Organization to characterise it as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, see [1]
The present paper proposes a bivariate structural model to forecast the daily need of intensive care unit (ICU) beds (IC) jointly with the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 symptoms (HwS), which approximates the population at risk for IC
Unlike other methodologies and approaches used for analyzing COVID-19 data, the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) approach proposed here relies on real-time daily official data as inputs, exploits the multivariate nature of the structural relationship between IC and HwS, and can be estimated over relatively short samples
Summary
The human-to-human transmission of SARS-CoV-2 has spread around the world, prompting the World Health Organization to characterise it as a pandemic on March 11, 2020, see [1]. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) reported 2, 520, 522 infected between 31 December 2019 and April 22, 2020, including 176, 786 deaths, affecting more than 210 countries from all five continents, see the ECDC Epidemiological Update. Several regions and countries have introduced strong measures to mitigate contagion through rigid social-distance measures and partial or total lock-downs. Has been the country with an early onset of the pandemic, with the region of Lombardy affected by COVID-19.
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