Back

Prominent Spatiotemporal Waves of COVID-19 Incidence in the United States: Implications for Causality, Forecasting, and Control

Jalal, H.; Lee, K.; Burke, D. S.

2021-07-03 epidemiology
10.1101/2021.06.29.21259726 medRxiv
Show abstract

Better understanding of the spatiotemporal structure of the COVID-19 epidemic in the USA may help inform more effective prevention and control strategies. By analyzing daily COVID-19 case data in the United States, Mexico and Canada, we found four continental-scale epidemic wave patterns, including travelling waves, that spanned multiple state and even international boundaries. These major epidemic patterns co-varied strongly with continental-scale seasonal temperature change patterns. Geo-contiguous states shared similar timing and amplitude of epidemic wave patterns irrespective of similarities or differences in state government political party affiliations. These analyses provide evidence that seasonal factors, probably weather changes, have exerted major effects on local COVID-19 incidence rates. Seasonal wave patterns observed during the first year of the epidemic may become repeated in the subsequent years. One Sentence SummaryThe COVID-19 epidemic in the United States has consisted of four continental-scale spatiotemporal waves of case incidence that have spanned multiple states and even international boundaries.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.