Short-term forecasts and long-term mitigation evaluations for the COVID-19 epidemic in Hubei Province, China

As an emerging infectious disease, the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has developed into a global pandemic. During the initial spreading of the virus in China, we demonstrated the ensemble Kalman filter performed well as a short-term predictor of the daily cases reported in Wuhan City. Second, we used an individual-level network-based model to reconstruct the epidemic dynamics in Hubei Province and examine the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions on the epidemic spreading with various scenarios. Our simulation results show that without continued control measures, the epidemic in Hubei Province could have become persistent. Only by continuing to decrease the infection rate through 1) protective measures and 2) social distancing can the actual epidemic trajectory that happened in Hubei Province be reconstructed in simulation. Finally, we simulate the COVID-19 transmission with non-Markovian processes and show how these models produce different epidemic trajectories, compared to those obtained with Markov processes. Since recent studies show that COVID-19 epidemiological parameters do not follow exponential distributions leading to Markov processes, future works need to focus on non-Markovian models to better capture the COVID-19 spreading trajectories. In addition, shortening the infectious period via early case identification and isolation can slow the epidemic spreading significantly.