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COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models

When the novel coronavirus disease SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, the scientific community had already braced up in the effort of making sense of the fast-growing wealth of data gathered by national authorities all over the world. However, despite t...

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Autores principales: Carletti, Timoteo, Fanelli, Duccio, Piazza, Francesco
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7297692/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csfx.2020.100034
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author Carletti, Timoteo
Fanelli, Duccio
Piazza, Francesco
author_facet Carletti, Timoteo
Fanelli, Duccio
Piazza, Francesco
author_sort Carletti, Timoteo
collection PubMed
description When the novel coronavirus disease SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, the scientific community had already braced up in the effort of making sense of the fast-growing wealth of data gathered by national authorities all over the world. However, despite the diversity of novel theoretical approaches and the comprehensiveness of many widely established models, the official figures that recount the course of the outbreak still sketch a largely elusive and intimidating picture. Here we show unambiguously that the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak belongs to the simple universality class of the SIR model and extensions thereof. Our analysis naturally leads us to establish that there exists a fundamental limitation to any theoretical approach, namely the unpredictable non-stationarity of the testing frames behind the reported figures. However, we show how such bias can be quantified self-consistently and employed to mine useful and accurate information from the data. In particular, we describe how the time evolution of the reporting rates controls the occurrence of the apparent epidemic peak, which typically follows the true one in countries that were not vigorous enough in their testing at the onset of the outbreak. The importance of testing early and resolutely appears as a natural corollary of our analysis, as countries that tested massively at the start clearly had their true peak earlier and less deaths overall.
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spelling pubmed-72976922020-06-17 COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models Carletti, Timoteo Fanelli, Duccio Piazza, Francesco Chaos, Solitons & Fractals: X Article When the novel coronavirus disease SARS-CoV2 (COVID-19) was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO in March 2020, the scientific community had already braced up in the effort of making sense of the fast-growing wealth of data gathered by national authorities all over the world. However, despite the diversity of novel theoretical approaches and the comprehensiveness of many widely established models, the official figures that recount the course of the outbreak still sketch a largely elusive and intimidating picture. Here we show unambiguously that the dynamics of the COVID-19 outbreak belongs to the simple universality class of the SIR model and extensions thereof. Our analysis naturally leads us to establish that there exists a fundamental limitation to any theoretical approach, namely the unpredictable non-stationarity of the testing frames behind the reported figures. However, we show how such bias can be quantified self-consistently and employed to mine useful and accurate information from the data. In particular, we describe how the time evolution of the reporting rates controls the occurrence of the apparent epidemic peak, which typically follows the true one in countries that were not vigorous enough in their testing at the onset of the outbreak. The importance of testing early and resolutely appears as a natural corollary of our analysis, as countries that tested massively at the start clearly had their true peak earlier and less deaths overall. The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. 2020-03 2020-06-17 /pmc/articles/PMC7297692/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csfx.2020.100034 Text en © 2020 The Authors Since January 2020 Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre - including this research content - immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.
spellingShingle Article
Carletti, Timoteo
Fanelli, Duccio
Piazza, Francesco
COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title_full COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title_fullStr COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title_full_unstemmed COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title_short COVID-19: The unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
title_sort covid-19: the unreasonable effectiveness of simple models
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7297692/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.csfx.2020.100034
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