ABSTRACT
Infectious disease modeling plays an important role in understanding disease spreading dynamics and can be used for prevention and control. The well-known SIR (Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered) compartment model and spatial and spatio-temporal statistical models are common choices for studying problems of this kind. This paper proposes a spatio-temporal modeling framework to characterize infectious disease dynamics by integrating the SIR compartment and log-Gaussian Cox process (LGCP) models. The method's performance is assessed via simulation using a combination of real and synthetic data for a region in São Paulo, Brazil. We also apply our modeling approach to analyze COVID-19 dynamics in Cali, Colombia. The results show that our modified LGCP model, which takes advantage of information obtained from the previous SIR modeling step, leads to a better forecasting performance than equivalent models that do not do that. Finally, the proposed method also allows the incorporation of age-stratified contact information, which provides valuable decision-making insights. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00477-022-02354-4.