Statistical deconvolution for inference of infection time series (preprint)

Accurate measurement of daily infection incidence is crucial to epidemic response. However, delays in symptom onset, testing, and reporting obscure the dynamics of transmission, necessitating methods to remove the effects of stochastic delays from observed data. Existing estimators can be sensitive to model misspecification and censored observations; many analysts have instead used methods that exhibit strong bias or do not account for delays. We develop an estimator with a regularization scheme to cope with these sources of noise, which we term the Robust Incidence Deconvolution Estimator (RIDE). We validate RIDE on synthetic data, comparing accuracy and stability to existing approaches. We then use RIDE to study COVID-19 records in the United States, and find evidence that infection estimates from reported cases can be more informative than estimates from mortality data. To implement these methods, we release incidental, a ready-to-use R implementation of our estimator that can aid ongoing efforts to monitor the COVID-19 pandemic.

Estimating the Changing Infection Rate of COVID-19 Using Bayesian Models of Mobility (preprint)

In order to prepare for and control the continued spread of the COVID-19 pandemic while minimizing its economic impact, the world needs to be able to estimate and predict COVID-19's spread. Unfortunately, we cannot directly observe the prevalence or growth rate of COVID-19; these must be inferred using some kind of model. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian extension to the classic susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) compartmental model that adds compartments to account for isolation and death and allows the infection rate to vary as a function of both mobility data collected from mobile phones and a latent time-varying factor that accounts for changes in behavior not captured by mobility data. Since confirmed-case data is unreliable, we infer the model's parameters conditioned on deaths data. We replace the exponential-waiting-time assumption of classic compartmental models with Erlang distributions, which allows for a more realistic model of the long lag between exposure and death. The mobility data gives us a leading indicator that can quickly detect changes in the pandemic's local growth rate and forecast changes in death rates weeks ahead of time. This is an analysis of observational data, so any causal interpretations of the model's inferences should be treated as suggestive at best; nonetheless, the model's inferred relationship between different kinds of trips and the infection rate do suggest some possible hypotheses about what kinds of activities might contribute most to COVID-19's spread.