Projecting the course of COVID-19 in Turkey: A probabilistic modeling approach

Abstract

Background/aim: The COVID-19 Pandemic originated in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 and became one of the worst global health crises ever. While struggling with the unknown nature of this novel coronavirus, many researchers and groups attempted to project the progress of the pandemic using empirical or mechanistic models, each one having its drawbacks. The first confirmed cases were announced early in March, and since then, serious containment measures have taken place in Turkey. Materials and methods: Here, we present a different approach, a Bayesian negative binomial multilevel model with mixed effects, for the projection of the COVID-19 pandemic and apply this model to the Turkish case. The model source code is available at https://github.com/kansil/covid-19. We predicted confirmed daily cases and cumulative numbers for June 6th to June 26th with 80%, 95% and 99% prediction intervals (PI). Results: Our projections showed that if we continued to comply with measures and no drastic changes are seen in diagnosis or management protocols, the epidemic curve would tend to decrease in this time interval. Also, the predictive validity analysis suggests that proposed model projections should be in the 95% PI band for the first 12 days of the projections. Conclusion: We expect that drastic changes in the course of the COVID-19 in Turkey will cause the model to suffer in predictive validity, and this can be used to monitor the epidemic. We hope that the discussion on these projections and the limitations of the epidemiological forecasting will be beneficial to the medical community, and policymakers.

COVID-19 Process: Turkey Experience

“…1918 yılında yaşanan İspanyol gribinin bulaş oranı 2,4; 2009 yılında yaşanan inflenza salgınında bulaşıcılık oranının 1,7; SARS-COV için 2,4 ve MERS-COV için 0,69'dur (Petersen vd., 2020). Covid-19'un temel bulaşma katsayısı R0'ın 2 ile 5 arasında olduğu hatta 5'ten büyük olduğu ülkeler tespit edilmiştir (Rahman vd., 2020;Acar vd., 2020). Ayrıca diğer insan Coronavirüs örneklerinde kışın bulaşıcılığın arttığı görülmüştür, benzer bir tavır Covid-19 için de beklenmektedir (Kissler vd., 2020).…”

“…Çalışmamız pandeminin birinci dalgası ve onu takip eden ikinci dalgası sürecinde Türkiye'nin resmini çekmesi açısından önemlidir. Literatürde Türkiye için Covid-19 pandemisini değerlendiren sınırlı sayıda çalışma bulunmaktadır (Acar vd., 2020;Alpago & Oduncu-Alpago, 2020;Cakmakli vd., 2020, Ergül vd., 2020. Ülkemiz için Covid-19 sürecinin takip eden ve değerlendiren çalışmalar hususunda literatürde ciddi bir açık bulunmaktadır ve bu konuda yeni çalışmaların yapılması elzemdir.…”

Did we do it right? The effect of postponing elective orthopedic surgeries due to the pandemic on the quality of life

“…This date is also the date when the first case was seen in our country (3). Especially in the early stages of the disease, preventive social measures have become very important due to the lack of definitive treatment and protective vaccines (4,5). In our country, in addition to many measures restricting social life, such as the prohibition of city entrances and curfews, serious restrictions have also been introduced in the hospitals.…”

Measuring Efficiency of Public Hospitals Under the Impact of Covid-19 in Türki̇ye

“…Indeed, telemedicine applications served to support outpatient services and manage healthcare organizations were useful to delivery of healthcare but also were responsible of for further reductions in service access [7,8]. Moreover, the fear of infection of Covid-19, socio-economic barriers set by the pandemic, like curfews, stay at home orders, loss of jobs or income, were decreasing the demand and rising the unmet needs [8][9][10].…”