Pandemic Equation for Describing and Predicting COVID19 Evolution

Shur, Michael

The purpose of this work is to describe the dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemics accounting for the mitigation measures, for the introduction or removal of the quarantine, and for the effect of vaccination when and if introduced. The methods used include the derivation of the Pandemic Equation describing the mitigation measures via the evolution of the growth time constant in the Pandemic Equation resulting in an asymmetric pandemic curve with a steeper rise than a decrease and mitigation measures. The Pandemic Equation predicts how the quarantine removal and business opening lead to a spike in the pandemic curve. The effective vaccination reduces the new daily infections predicted by the Pandemic Equation. The pandemic curves in many localities have similar time dependencies but shifted in time. The Pandemic Equation parameters extracted from the well advanced pandemic curves can be used for predicting the pandemic evolution in the localities, where the pandemics is still in the initial stages. Using the multiple pandemic locations for the parameter extraction allows for the uncertainty quantification in predicting the pandemic evolution using the introduced Pandemic Equation. Compared with other pandemic models our approach allows for easier parameter extraction amenable to using Artificial Intelligence models.