Nowcasting Deadly Infections

Nowcasting Fatal Infections and modelling district specific Covid-19 mortality

The number of registered infected is not necessarily a reliable information about the true number of infected in a population, since registration depends on testing policies and information flow. Therefore, the number of deaths due to Covid-19 is often considered to be more reliable information on the spread of the disease of a population. In this project we exclusively look at the number of reported deaths and model mortality rates related to Covid-19 on a district specific level based on data from the Robert-Koch-Institute. This allows us to investigate temporal and regional structures. The model also involves a nowcasting strategy so that based on today deaths, we can nowcast the number of fatal infection being registered today, that is we give an real-time estimate on how many Covid-19 cases, that get registered as newly infected today, will die from the disease.

Preliminary version of the manuscript:

Marc Schneble, Giacomo De Nicola, Göran Kauermann, Ursula Berger (2020): Nowcasting fatal COVID-19 infections on a regional level in Germany

The paper is accepted at Biometrical Journal and will be published soon.

Current Results

The following plot shows the currently (October 27) observed and nowcasted numbers of COVID-19 infections ending fatal by date of registration as COVID-19 infected.

How to read the plot: On October 27 we observe 21 deaths which are related to a COVID-19 infection registered on October 16. Based on our model we expect that this number will increase to 45 in the end (with a 95% confidence interval ranging from 40-50).