Going by the numbers : Learning and modeling COVID-19 disease dynamics.

Sayantani Basu,Roy H Campbell

doi:10.1016/j.chaos.2020.110140

Abstract

The COrona VIrus Disease (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) has resulted in a challenging number of infections and deaths worldwide. In order to combat the pandemic, several countries worldwide enforced mitigation measures in the forms of lockdowns, social distancing, and disinfection measures. In an effort to understand the dynamics of this disease, we propose a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) based model. We train our model on more than four months of cumulative COVID-19 cases and deaths. Our model can be adjusted based on the parameters in order to provide predictions as needed. We provide results at both the country and county levels. We also perform a quantitative comparison of mitigation measures in various counties in the United States based on the rate of difference of a short and long window parameter of the proposed LSTM model. The analyses provided by our model can provide valuable insights based on the trends in the rate of infections and deaths. This can also be of help for countries and counties deciding on mitigation and reopening strategies. We believe that the results obtained from the proposed method will contribute to societal benefits for a current global concern.

Highlights

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus which spread from China in December 2019 led to severe health problems and fatalities worldwide, eventually turning into a global pandemic
Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTMs) that were originally proposed by Hochreiter and Schmidhuber [36], are a special kind of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) that have the ability of capturing long-term dependencies
Our analyses based on our proposed LSTM model are divided into two main parts: the prediction models that show predictions of COVID-19 confirmed cases/deaths and evaluations on how well social distancing/mitigation measures are working in the present scenario

Summary

Introduction

The outbreak of a novel coronavirus which spread from China in December 2019 led to severe health problems and fatalities worldwide, eventually turning into a global pandemic. The virus was named the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) and the disease caused due to it was named the COrona VIrus Disease (COVID19). The most common symptoms are cough and fever, symptoms range in severity including pneumonia-like symptoms and dyspnea [1]. It was confirmed that COVID-19 spread through infected respiratory droplets transmitted from an infected person to a healthy person [2]. Other symptoms in humans have been studied, including relations to the gastrointestinal system [3] and skin rashes [4]. More recent studies have focused on other possible zoonotic pathways, including other species that can possibly contract COVID-19 [5]

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Conclusion