The effect of population size for pathogen transmission on prediction of COVID-19 spread

Extreme public health interventions play a critical role in mitigating the local and global prevalence and pandemic potential. Here, we use population size for pathogen transmission to measure the intensity of public health interventions, which is a key characteristic variable for nowcasting and forecasting of COVID-19. By formulating a hidden Markov dynamic system and using nonlinear filtering theory, we have developed a stochastic epidemic dynamic model under public health interventions. The model parameters and states are estimated in time from internationally available public data by combining an unscented filter and an interacting multiple model filter. Moreover, we consider the computability of the population size and provide its selection criterion. With applications to COVID-19, we estimate the mean of the effective reproductive number of China and the rest of the globe except China (GEC) to be 2.4626 (95% CI: 2.4142–2.5111) and 3.0979 (95% CI: 3.0968–3.0990), respectively. The prediction results show the effectiveness of the stochastic epidemic dynamic model with nonlinear filtering. The hidden Markov dynamic system with nonlinear filtering can be used to make analysis, nowcasting and forecasting for other contagious diseases in the future since it helps to understand the mechanism of disease transmission and to estimate the population size for pathogen transmission and the number of hidden infections, which is a valid tool for decision-making by policy makers for epidemic control.