Increasing situational awareness through nowcasting of the reproduction number.

ABSTRACT:

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 detect

SUBMITTER: Bizzotto A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11371679 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature