Forecasting Covid-19 Outbreak Progression in Italian Regions: A model based on neural network training from Chinese data

Cosimo Distante; Igor Gadelha Pereira; Luiz Marcos Garcia Goncalves; Prisco Piscitelli; Alessandro Miani

The basic reproduction number (R0) is an indicator that resumes the average number of people that can infected by a person who has already acquired the infection. R 0 is a metric of how contagious is t disease and its correct estimation is extremely important for epidemiologists, especially when facing ne diseases like COVID-19. R 0 can be computed in different ways. In our models, we have estimated t basic reproduction number (R 0 ) both by fitting the exponential growth rate of the infection across a month periodand also by using day by day assessment, based on single observations [1] . This stu makes use of the susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (SEIR) compartment model [4] to predict t spreading of the pandemic in Italy. Our efforts could be helpfulin the adoption of all the possib preventive measures, and to study of the epidemics progression across Southern regions as opposed to t national trend. This metric can be biased by the optimal estimation of the basic reproductive number (pronounced R-nought). It must be said that R 0 is important if correlated with weather conditions and th reproductive index is reduced as the air temperature and relative humidity increase, [5] according to t formula: author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.