Universal risk phenotype of US counties for flu-like transmission to improve county-specific COVID-19 incidence forecasts.

ABSTRACT: The spread of a communicable disease is a complex spatio-temporal process shaped by the specific transmission mechanism, and diverse factors including the behavior, socio-economic and demographic properties of the host population. While the key factors shaping transmission of influenza and COVID-19 are beginning to be broadly understood, making precise forecasts on case count and mortality is still difficult. In this study we introduce the concept of a universal geospatial risk phenotype of individual US counties facilitating flu-like transmission mechanisms. We call this the Universal Influenza-like Transmission (UnIT) score, which is computed as an information-theoretic divergence of the local incidence time series from an high-risk process of epidemic initiation, inferred from almost a

SUBMITTER: Huang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8516313 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature