Restricted Prevalence Rates of COVID-19's Infectivity, Hospitalization, Recovery, Mortality in the USA and Their Implications

J Healthc Inform Res. 2020 Oct 9;5(2):133-150. doi: 10.1007/s41666-020-00078-0. eCollection 2021 Jun.

Abstract

This article constructs and demonstrates an alternate probabilistic approach (using incidence rate restricted model), compared with the deterministic mathematical models such as SIR, to capture the impact of healthcare efforts on the prevalence rate of the COVID-19's infectivity, hospitalization, recovery, and mortality in the eastern, central, mountain, and pacific time zone states in the USA. We add additional new properties for the incidence rate restricted Poisson probability distribution. With new properties, our method becomes feasible to comprehend not only the patterns of the prevalence rate of the COVID-19's infectivity, hospitalization, recovery, and mortality but also to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of social distancing, healthcare management's efforts to hospitalize the patients, the patient's immunity to recover, and lastly the unfortunate mortality itself. To make regional comparisons (as the people's movement is far more frequent within than outside the regional zone on daily basis), we group the COVID-19 data in terms of eastern, central, mountain, and pacific zone states. Several non-intuitive findings in the data results are noticed. They include the existence of imbalance, different vulnerability, and risk reduction in these four regions. For example, the impact of healthcare efforts is high in the recovery category in the pacific states. The impact is less in the hospitalization category in the mountain states. The least impact is seen in the infectivity category in the eastern zone states. A few thoughts on future research work are cited. It requires collecting rich data on COVID-19 and extracting valuable information for better public health policies.

Keywords: Data analytics; Imbalance; Operational efficiency; Risk reduction; Vulnerability.