Modeling the dynamics of the COVID-19 population in Australia: A probabilistic analysis

PLoS One. 2020 Oct 2;15(10):e0240153. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0240153. eCollection 2020.

Abstract

The novel coronavirus COVID-19 arrived on Australian shores around 25 January 2020. This paper presents a novel method of dynamically modeling and forecasting the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia with a high degree of accuracy and in a timely manner using limited data; a valuable resource that can be used to guide government decision-making on societal restrictions on a daily and/or weekly basis. The "partially-observable stochastic process" used in this study predicts not only the future actual values with extremely low error, but also the percentage of unobserved COVID-19 cases in the population. The model can further assist policy makers to assess the effectiveness of several possible alternative scenarios in their decision-making processes.

MeSH terms

  • Australia / epidemiology
  • Betacoronavirus
  • COVID-19
  • Coronavirus Infections / epidemiology*
  • Humans
  • Models, Statistical*
  • Pandemics
  • Pneumonia, Viral / epidemiology*
  • SARS-CoV-2

Grants and funding

The authors received no specific funding for this work.