Joint COVID-19 and influenza-like illness forecasts in the United States using internet search information

BACKGROUND: As the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic continues, severe seasonal Influenza (flu) may happen alongside COVID-19. This could cause a “twindemic”, in which there are additional burdens on health care resources and public safety compared to those occurring in the presence of a single infection. Amidst the raising trend of co-infections of the two diseases, forecasting both Influenza-like Illness (ILI) outbreaks and COVID-19 waves in a reliable and timely manner becomes more urgent than ever. Accurate and real-time joint prediction of the twindemic aids public health organizations and policymakers in adequate preparation and decision making. However, in the current pandemic, existing ILI and COVID-19 forecasting models face shortcomings under complex inter-disease dynamics, particularly due to the similarities in symptoms and healthcare-seeking patterns of the two diseases. METHODS: Inspired by the interconnection between ILI and COVID-19 activities, we combine related internet search and bi-disease time series information for the U.S. national level and state level forecasts. Our proposed ARGOX-Joint-Ensemble adopts a new ensemble framework that integrates ILI and COVID-19 disease forecasting models to pool the information between the two diseases and provide joint multi-resolution and multi-target predictions. Through a winner-takes-all ensemble fashion, our framework is able to adaptively select the most predictive COVID-19 or ILI signals. RESULTS: In the retrospective evaluation, our model steadily outperforms alternative benchmark methods, and remains competitive with other publicly available models in both point estimates and probabilistic predictions (including intervals). CONCLUSIONS: The success of our approach illustrates that pooling information between the ILI and COVID-19 leads to improved forecasting models than individual models for either of the disease.