Retrospective Characterization of the COVID-19 Epidemic in Four Selected European Countries Via Change Point Analysis

The focus of this contribution is to show how the course of the pandemic can be retrospectively investigated in terms of change points detection. At this aim, an automatic method based on recursive partitioning is employed, considering the time series of the 14-day notification rate of newly reported COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population collected by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. The application shows that the pandemic, at the individual country level, can be broken into different periods that do not correspond to the common notion of wave as a natural pattern of peaks and valleys implying predictable rises and falls. This retrospective analysis can be useful either to evaluate the implemented measures or to define adequate policies for the future. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Analysis on the accessibility of urban rescue in extreme weather

Schools are the key units for infectious disease prevention and control. Students are the key groups in prevention and control of infectious diseases. The establishment of links between schools and out campus hospitals is an important measure for epidemic prevention and control of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). How to use reasonable human resources, financial resources and material resources to make rational decisions and respond quickly to the best cost performance is the practical problem facing all schools. Therefore, the accessibility of Wuhan medical services to schools is analyzed through GIS, and the resilience of hospitals is analyzed by simulating short-term heavy rainfall weather. The results show that large hospitals in Wuhan are mostly concentrated in the city center, which can effectively resist the impact of sudden epidemic and disperse the risk to the periphery of the city. The buffer zone of large hospitals in Wuhan can effectively cover most schools and can respond quickly, but some hospitals have low accessibility in extreme weather. It is necessary to further improve the distribution of medical resources in various regions and improve emergency transportation planning. © 2022 ACM.