Forecasting of COVID-19: spread with dynamic transmission rate

Abstract

The COVID-19 was firstly reported in Wuhan, Hubei province, and it was brought to all over China by people travelling for Chinese New Year. The pandemic coronavirus with its catastrophic effects is now a global concern. Forecasting of COVID-19 spread has attracted a great attention for public health emergency. However, few researchers look into the relationship between dynamic transmission rate and preventable measures by authorities. In this paper, the SEIR (Susceptible Exposed Infectious Recovered) model is employed to investigate the spread of COVID-19. The epidemic spread is divided into two stages: before and after intervention. Before intervention, the transmission rate is assumed to be a constant since individual, community and government response has not taken into place. After intervention, the transmission rate is reduced dramatically due to the societal actions or measures to reduce and prevent the spread of disease. The transmission rate is assumed to follow an exponential function, and the removal rate is assumed to follow a power exponent function. The removal rate is increased with the evolution of the time. Using the real data, the model and parameters are optimized. The transmission rate without measure is calculated to be 0.033 and 0.030 for Hubei and outside Hubei province, respectively. After the model is established, the spread of COVID-19 in Hubei province, France and USA is predicted. From results, USA performs the worst according to the dynamic ratio. The model has provided a mathematical method to evaluate the effectiveness of the government response and can be used to forecast the spread of COVID-19 with better performance.