In March of this year, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and it continues to threaten public health. This global health crisis imposes limitations on daily movements, which have deteriorated every sector in our society. Understanding public reactions to the virus and the non-pharmaceutical interventions should be of great help to fight COVID-19 in a strategic way. We aim to provide tangible evidence of the human mobility trends by comparing the day-by-day variations across the U.S. Large-scale public mobility at an aggregated level is observed by leveraging mobile device location data and the measures related to social distancing. Our study captures spatial and temporal heterogeneity as well as the sociodemographic variations regarding the pandemic propagation and the non-pharmaceutical interventions. All mobility metrics adapted capture decreased public movements after the national emergency declaration. The population staying home has increased in all states and becomes more stable after the stay-at-home order with a smaller range of fluctuation. There exists overall mobility heterogeneity between the income or population density groups. The public had been taking active responses, voluntarily staying home more, to the in-state confirmed cases while the stay-at-home orders stabilize the variations. The study suggests that the public mobility trends conform with the government message urging to stay home. We anticipate our data-driven analysis offers integrated perspectives and serves as evidence to raise public awareness and, consequently, reinforce the importance of social distancing while assisting policymakers.
We analytically study the SEIR (Susceptible Exposed Infectious Removed) epidemic model. The aim is to provide simple analytical expressions for the peak and asymptotic values and their characteristic times of the populations affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
We provide a probabilistic SIRD model for the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, where we allow the infection, recovery and death rates to be random. In particular, the underlying random factor is driven by a fractional Brownian motion. Our model is simple and needs only some few parameters to be calibrated.
India is one of the worst affected countries by the Covid-19 pandemic at present. We studied publicly available data of the Covid-19 patients in India and analyzed possible impacts of quarantine and social distancing within the stochastic framework of the SEQIR model to illustrate the controlling strategy of the pandemic. Our simulation results clearly show that proper quarantine and social distancing should be maintained from an early time just at the start of the pandemic and should be continued till its end to effectively control the pandemic. This calls for a more socially disciplined life…
Understanding the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial for improved control and social distancing strategies. To that effect, we have employed the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered model, refined by contact tracing and hospitalization data from Indian provinces Kerala, Delhi, Maharashtra, and West Bengal, as well as from overall India. We have performed a sensitivity analysis to identify the most crucial input parameters, and we have calibrated the model to describe the data as best as possible. Short-term predictions reveal an increasing and worrying trend of COVID-19 cases for…
We consider a global (location independent) model of pandemic growth which generalizes the SIR model to accommodate important features of the COVID-19 pandemic, notably the implementation of pandemic reduction measures. This "SHIR" model is applied to COVID-19 data, and shows promise as a simple, tractable formalism with few parameters that can be used to model pandemic case numbers. As an example we show that the average time dependence of new COVID-19 cases per day from 15 Central and Western European countries is in good agreement with the analytic, parameter-free prediction of the model
A second wave pandemic constitutes an imminent threat to society, with a potentially immense toll in terms of human lives and a devastating economic impact. We employ the epidemic renormalisation group approach to pandemics, together with the first wave data for COVID-19, to efficiently simulate the dynamics of disease transmission and spreading across different European countries. The framework allows us to model, not only inter and extra European border control effects, but also the impact of social distancing for each country. We perform statistical analyses averaging on different level of …
The present article studies the extension of two deterministic models for describing the novel coronavirus pandemic crisis, the SIR model and the SEIR model. The models were studied and compared to real data in order to support the validity of each description and extract important information regarding the pandemic, such as the basic reproductive number R0, which might provide useful information concerning the rate of increase of the pandemic predicted by each model. We next proceed to making predictions and comparing more complex models derived from the SEIR model with the SIRD model, in ord…
In this paper, we deal with the study of the impact of nationwide measures COVID-19 anti-pandemic. We drive two processes to analyze COVID-19 data considering measures. We associate level of nationwide measure with value of parameters related to the contact rate of the model. Then a parametric solve, with respect to those parameters of measures, shows different possibilities of the evolution of the pandemic. Two machine learning tools are used to forecast the evolution of the pandemic. Finally, we show comparison between deterministic and two machine learning tools.
Several analytical models have been used in this work to describe the evolution of death cases arising from coronavirus (COVID-19). The Death or `D' model is a simplified version of the SIR (susceptible-infected-recovered) model, which assumes no recovery over time, and allows for the transmission-dynamics equations to be solved analytically. The D-model can be extended to describe various focuses of infection, which may account for the original pandemic (D1), the lockdown (D2) and other effects (Dn). The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in several countries (China, Spain, Italy, France, UK,…
COVID-19 is now the largest pandemic crisis of this century, with over 16 million registered cases worldwide. African countries have now begun registering an increasing number of cases, yet, not many models developed focus in specific African countries. In our study we use a simple SEIR model to evaluate and predict future scenarios regarding the pandemic crisis in Mozambique. We compare the effect of different policies on the infection curve and estimate epidemiological parameters such as the current infection reproduction number Rt and the growth rate g. We have found a low value for Rt, ran…
We present a phenomenological procedure of dealing with the COVID--19 data provided by government health agencies of eleven different countries. Instead of using the (exact or approximate) solutions to the SIR (or other) model(s) to fit the data by adjusting the time--independent parameters included in those models, we introduce dynamical parameters whose time--dependence may be phenomenologically obtained by adequately extrapolating a chosen subset of the daily provided data. This phenomenological approach works extremely well to properly adjust the number of infected (and removed) individual…
To contain the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, one of the non-pharmacological epidemic control measures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak is reducing the transmission rate of SARS-COV-2 in the population through (physical) social distancing. An interactive web-based mapping platform that provides timely quantitative information on how people in different counties and states reacted to the social distancing guidelines was developed with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF). It integrates geographic information systems (GIS) and daily updated human mobility statistica…
The COVID-19 pandemic has, worldwide and up to December 2020, caused over 1.7 million deaths, and put the world's most advanced healthcare systems under heavy stress. In many countries, drastic restrictive measures adopted by political authorities, such as national lockdowns, have not prevented the outbreak of new pandemic's waves. In this article, we propose an integrated detection-estimation-forecasting framework that, using publicly available data, is designed to: (i) learn relevant features of the pandemic (e.g., the infection rate); (ii) detect as quickly as possible the onset (or the ter…
A mathematical model for the COVID-19 pandemic spread, which integrates age-structured Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered-Deceased dynamics with real mobile phone data accounting for the population mobility, is presented. The dynamical model adjustment is performed via Approximate Bayesian Computation. Optimal lockdown and exit strategies are determined based on nonlinear model predictive control, constrained to public-health and socio-economic factors. Through an extensive computational validation of the methodology, it is shown that it is possible to compute robust exit strategies with r…
Application of Benford's law to data on daily new cases of infection by Covid 2019 in some Coutries (Brazil, China, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, United Kingdom, United States of America).
This paper introduces a mathematical framework for determining second surge behavior of COVID-19 cases in the United States. Within this framework, a flexible algorithmic approach selects a set of turning points for each state, computes distances between them, and determines whether each state is in (or over) a first or second surge. Then, appropriate distances between normalized time series are used to further analyze the relationships between case trajectories on a month-by-month basis. Our algorithm shows that 31 states are experiencing second surges, while 4 of the 10 largest states are st…
This paper introduces new methods to track the offset between two multivariate time series on a continuous basis. We then apply this framework to COVID-19 counts on a state-by-state basis in the United States to determine the progression from cases to deaths as a function of time. Across multiple approaches, we reveal an "up-down-up" pattern in the estimated offset between reported cases and deaths as the pandemic progresses. This analysis could be used to predict imminent increased load on a healthcare system and aid the allocation of additional resources in advance.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has triggered a worldwide outbreak of pandemic, and transportation services have played a key role in coronavirus transmission. Although not crowded in a confined space like a bus or a metro car, bike sharing users will be exposed to the bike surface and take the transmission risk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, how to meet user demand and avoid virus spreading has become an important issue for bike sharing. Based on the trip data of bike sharing in Nanjing, China, this study analyzes the travel demand and operation management before and after the pandemic ou…
Preliminary evidence suggests that women, including female researchers, are disproportionately affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of unequal distribution of childcare, elderly care and other kinds of domestic and emotional labor. Sudden lockdowns and abrupt shifts in daily routines have disproportionate consequences on their productivity, which is reflected by a sudden drop in research output in biomedical research, consequently affecting the number of female authors of scientific publications. We investigate the proportion of male and female researchers who published scientific papers…
This paper continues to highlight trends in mobility and sociability in New York City (NYC), and supplements them with similar data from Seattle, WA, two of the cities most affected by COVID-19 in the U.S. Seattle may be further along in its recovery from the pandemic and ensuing lockdown than NYC, and may offer some insights into how travel patterns change. Finally, some preliminary findings from cities in China are discussed, two months following the lifting of their lockdowns, to offer a glimpse further into the future of recovery.
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic policy uncertainty in the US and the UK. The impact of the increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths in the country, and the increase in the number of cases and deaths outside the country may vary. To examine this, the study employs bootstrap ARDL cointegration approach from March 8, 2020 to May 24, 2020. According to the bootstrap ARDL results, a long-run equilibrium relationship is confirmed for five out of the 10 models. The long-term coefficients obtained from the ARDL models suggest that an increase i…
The paper presents an innovative method for tourist route planning inside a destination. The necessity of reorganizing the tourist routes within a destination comes as an immediate response to the Covid-19 crisis. The implementation of the method inside tourist destinations can be an important advantage in transforming a destination into a safer destination in times of Covid-19 and post-Covid-19. The existing trend of shortening the tourist stay length has been accelerated while the epidemic became a pandemic. Moreover, the wariness for future pandemics has brought to the spotlight the issue o…
This study focuses on an important transport-related long-term effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: an increase in telecommuting. Analyzing a nationally representative panel survey of adults, we find that 40-50% of workers expect to telecommute at least a few times per month post-pandemic, up from 24% pre-COVID. If given the option, 90-95% of those who first telecommuted during the pandemic plan to continue the practice regularly. We also find that new telecommuters are demographically similar to pre-COVID telecommuters. Both pre- and post-COVID, higher educational attainment …
The ongoing, fluid nature of the COVID-19 pandemic requires individuals to regularly seek information about best health practices, local community spreading, and public health guidelines. In the absence of a unified response to the pandemic in the United States and clear, consistent directives from federal and local officials, people have used social media to collectively crowdsource COVID-19 elites, a small set of trusted COVID-19 information sources. We take a census of COVID-19 crowdsourced elites in the United States who have received sustained attention on Twitter during the pandemic. Usi…
The outbreak and pandemic of the COVID-19 has dramatically changed the world in almost every aspect. Its impact on the community of high energy physics is also apparent. In this analysis we show that social distancing has greatly changed the working style of the physics community. In the field of high energy physics the online communications and video conferences are becoming daily routine arrangements. However, such a change of working styles may need some time to get used to. The influence can be seen by scientific outcomes harvested from arXiv, INSPIRE databases and JHEP, PRD official websi…
In the last decade, humanity has faced many different pandemics such as SARS, H1N1, and presently novel coronavirus (COVID-19). On one side, scientists are focusing on vaccinations, and on the other side, there is a need to propose models that can help us in understanding the spread of these pandemics as it can help governmental and other concerned agencies to be well prepared, especially from pandemics, which spreads faster like COVID-19. The main reason for some epidemic turning into pandemics is the connectivity among different regions of the world, which makes it easier to affect a wider g…
In this paper, we use SIR model to simulate the COVID-19 pandemic for Cincinnati Tri-State Area. We have built a representative population of Cincinnati that includes movements for traveling to stores, schools, workplaces, and traveling to friends houses. Using this model, we simulate the effect of quarantine, return to work, and panic buying. We show that that there will be a second wave of infections when people return to work and significant increase in number of infections when there is panic buying at stores with the announcement of the quarantine measures.
During the epidemics of COVID-19, the whole world is experiencing a serious crisis on public health and economy. Understanding human mobility during the pandemic helps one to design intervention strategies and resilience measures. The widely used Bike Sharing System (BSS) can characterize the activities of urban dwellers over time & space in big cities but is rarely reported in epidemiological research. In this paper, we present a human mobility analyzing framework} based on BSS data, which examines the spatiotemporal characteristics of share bike users, detects the key time nodes of different…
The constrained outbreak of COVID-19 in Mainland China has recently been regarded as a successful example of fighting this highly contagious virus. Both the short period (in about three months) of transmission and the sub-exponential increase of confirmed cases in Mainland China have proved that the Chinese authorities took effective epidemic prevention measures, such as case isolation, travel restrictions, closing recreational venues, and banning public gatherings. These measures can, of course, effectively control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, they may dramatically change t…
An evolutionary game model is developed to study the interplay between consumers and producers when trade takes place on an e-commerce marketplace. The type of delivery service available and consumers' taste are particularly important regarding both game payoffs and players' strategies. The game payoff matrix is then adapted to analyse the different trading patterns that were developed during the COVID-19 pandemic in both the traditional retail and e-commerce sectors. In contrast to the former, investment in logistics and warehouses in the e-commerce sector allowed for the emergence of a trend…
The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unprecedented natural experiment providing insights into the emergence of collective behavioral changes of both exogenous (government mandated) and endogenous (spontaneous reaction to infection risks) origin. Here, we characterize collective physical distancing -- mobility reductions, minimization of contacts, shortening of contact duration -- in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the pre-vaccine era by analyzing de-identified, privacy-preserving location data for a panel of over 5.5 million anonymized, opted-in U.S. devices. We define five indicators of users…
'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic productivity? Here we show that academics are posting just as many publications on the arXiv pre-print server as if there were no pandemic: 168,630 were posted in 2020, a +12.6% change from 2019 and $+1.4σ$ deviation above the predicted 162,577 $\pm$ 4,393. However, some immediate impacts are visible in individual research fields. Conference cancellations have led to s…