A study of the attenuation stage of a global infectious disease

Tianyi Sun; Baisuo Jin; Yuehua Wu; Junjun Bao

doi:10.3389/fpubh.2024.1379481

A study of the attenuation stage of a global infectious disease

Front Public Health. 2024 Apr 5:12:1379481. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1379481. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Tianyi Sun¹, Baisuo Jin¹, Yuehua Wu², Junjun Bao³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Statistics and Finance, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China.
² Department of Mathematics and Statistics, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada.
³ Endoscopy Center, The First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China.

Abstract

Introduction: Differences in control measures and response speeds between regions may be responsible for the differences in the number of infections of global infectious diseases. Therefore, this article aims to examine the decay stage of global infectious diseases. We demonstrate our method by considering the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020.

Methods: We introduce the concept of the attenuation rate into the varying coefficient SEIR model to measure the effect of different cities on epidemic control, and make inferences through the integrated adjusted Kalman filter algorithm.

Results: We applied the varying coefficient SEIR model to 136 cities in China where the total number of confirmed cases exceeded 20 after the implementation of control measures and analyzed the relationship between the estimated attenuation rate and local factors. Subsequent analysis and inference results show that the attenuation rate is significantly related to the local annual GDP and the longitude and latitude of a city or a region. We also apply the varying coefficient SEIR model to other regions outside China. We find that the fitting curve of the average daily number of new confirmed cases simulated by the variable coefficient SEIR model is consistent with the real data.

Discussion: The results show that the cities with better economic development are able to control the epidemic more effectively to a certain extent. On the other hand, geographical location also affected the effectiveness of regional epidemic control. In addition, through the results of attenuation rate analysis, we conclude that China and South Korea have achieved good results in controlling the epidemic in 2020.

Keywords: attenuation rate; global infectious diseases; kalman filter; reporting delay; varying coefficient SEIR model.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
COVID-19* / epidemiology
COVID-19* / prevention & control
China / epidemiology
Cities
Communicable Disease Control
Communicable Diseases / epidemiology
Epidemics / prevention & control
Global Health
Humans
SARS-CoV-2

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work is partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 72111530199, 12231017, and 72293573), the Natural Science Foundation of Anhui Province of China (Grant No. 2108085J02), and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant No. RGPIN-2023-05655).