Optimal two-stage spatial sampling design for estimating critical parameters of SARS-CoV-2 epidemic: Efficiency versus feasibility

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented clinical and healthcare challenge for the many medical researchers who are attempting to prevent its worldwide spread. It also presents a challenge for statisticians involved in designing appropriate sampling plans to estimate the crucial parameters of the pandemic. These plans are necessary for monitoring and surveillance of the phenomenon and evaluating health policies. In this respect, we can use spatial information and aggregate data regarding the number of verified infections (either hospitalized or in compulsory quarantine) to improve the standard two-stage sampling design broadly adopted for studying human populations. We present an optimal spatial sampling design based on spatially balanced sampling techniques. We prove its relative performance analytically in comparison to other competing sampling plans, and we also study its properties through a series of Monte Carlo experiments. Considering the optimal theoretical properties of the proposed sampling plan and its feasibility, we discuss suboptimal designs that approximate well optimality and are more readily applicable.