Increasing situational awareness through nowcasting of the reproduction number
Bibliographic Data
Background: The time-varying reproduction number R is a critical variable for situational awareness during infectious disease outbreaks; however, delays between infection and reporting of cases hinder its accurate estimation in real-time. A number of nowcasting methods, leveraging available information on data consolidation delays, have been proposed to mitigate this problem. Methods: In this work, we retrospectively validate the use of a nowcasting algorithm during 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy by quantitatively assessing its performance against standard methods for the estimation of R. Results: Nowcasting significantly reduced the median lag in the estimation of R from 13 to 8 days, while concurrently enhancing accuracy. Furthermore, it allowed the detection of periods of epidemic growth with a lead of between 6 and 23 days. Conclusions: Nowcasting augments epidemic awareness, empowering better informed public health responses
Disease · Estimation · Geography · Medical emergency · Nowcasting · Outbreak · Pandemic · Situation awareness · Computer Science · COVID-19 epidemiological studies · Data-Driven Disease Surveillance · Engineering · Medicine · Zoonotic diseases and public health · Internal Medicine · Virology
| Citation velocity | historical |
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| Highly cited | No |