A framework for identifying regional outbreak and spread of COVID-19 from one-minute population-wide surveys

Hagai Rossman; Ayya Keshet; Smadar Shilo; Amir Gavrieli; Tal Bauman; Ori Cohen; Ran Balicer; Benjamin Geiger; Yuval Dor; Eran Segal

In conclusion, here we developed a short survey based on symptoms associated with COVID-19 infection with the primary goal of early detection of clusters of COVID-19 outbreak. At the time of writing, only seven days after the survey was published, 54,059 responders have already completed it. As expected, we are also detecting a higher percentage of symptoms among individuals who are in home isolation, compared to those who are not (0.06 and 0.05 respectively, ). Temporal analysis of the e 0 p < 5 − 1 symptoms rate during the first week shows a relatively stable rate in the population at daytime, where response rate is relatively high (Figure 1 ). Although the spread of COVID-19 infection is exponential 7 , and the number of confirmed COVID-19 patients in Israel has increased from 193 cases on March 14th 2020 to 883 patients on March 21th noontime 8 , it has yet to reach the vast majority of Israel's population. We therefore hypothesize that these symptoms may reflect other respiratory infections which are prevalent in Israel during this period (such as infections caused by an influenza virus), as many of these diseases share common symptoms 9 . This is supported by the fact that we detected symptoms which were less prevalent in patients with COVID-19 at a similar rate as those who were common in these patients. For example, cough, which is one of the most common symptoms in patients with COVID-19 infection 6 was present in a similar percentage of responders as rhinorrhea or nasal congestion which is uncommon in this infection (14%) (Table 1, Figure 4 ). If our hypothesis is correct, this rate can be viewed as a baseline rate that will allow us to further detect subtle changes with a high geographic resolution which may reflect a spread of COVID-19 infection.