Urgently Needed for Policy Guidance: An Operational Tool for Monitoring the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The radical uncertainty around the current COVID19 pandemics requires that governments around the world should be able to track in real time not only how the virus spreads but, most importantly, what policies are effective in keeping the spread of the disease under check. To improve the quality of health decision-making, we argue that it is necessary to monitor and compare acceleration/deceleration of confirmed cases over health policy responses, across countries. To do so, we provide a simple mathematical tool to estimate the convexity/concavity of trends in epidemiological surveillance data. Had it been applied at the onset of the crisis, it would have offered more opportunities to measure the impact of the policies undertaken in different Asian countries, and to allow European and North-American governments to draw quicker lessons from these Asian experiences when making policy decisions. Our tool can be especially useful as the epidemic is currently extending to lower-income African and South American countries, some of which have weaker health systems.

Real-Time Estimation of Rt for Supporting Public-Health Policies Against COVID-19

“…After numerically finding the value that minimizes a curve-fitting functional, they evaluate the basic reproduction number considering two types of spreaders. Alternatively to these approaches, Luchini et al ( 17 ) proposes a mathematical model that allows evaluating the convexity/concavity of trends in epidemiological surveillance data, evaluating the progression of the pandemic based on changes between acceleration and deceleration based on epidemiological metrics. The resulting plots of convexity or concavity, which would describe pandemic acceleration or deceleration, can be used as an adjunct criterion to the analysis of surveillance data to assess the pandemic's evolution ( 18 ).…”

Not far enough: Public health policies to combat COVID-19 in Mexico’s states

“…The heterogeneity in the states' policy response highlights the need for a subnational approach to analyze government action to the COVID-19 pandemic-especially in the absence of a consistent national response. It is in this sense that the data and analysis presented here make an original and fundamental contribution [29,30]. Other efforts to document, analyze and measure the effectiveness of the implementation of public policies in the face of COVID-19 have adopted a national vision [31], Those studies offer a useful overview, but are subject to what in the social sciences has been called the "whole country bias" [32].…”

Sub-National Allocation of COVID-19 Tests: An Efficiency Criterion with an Application to Italian Regions

“…Our criterion builds upon a new approach that is designed to monitor and respond to a pandemic like COVID-19 (see [13]). The approach organises the data in real time in order to detect whether an ongoing pandemic is accelerating or decelerating.…”

“…It is based on the idea that in times of uncertainty, when it is difficult to have good knowledge on probabilities and thus difficult to make reliable forecasting models, decisions have to be based on the information available more than anything else. Following [17] and [13], the question is how we can use available information to detect acceleration or deceleration of harm in the current case of the pandemic. To answer this question the number of tests is crucial.…”