Tracking and forecasting milepost moments of the epidemic in the early-outbreak: framework and applications to the COVID-19

Huiwen Wang; Yanwen Zhang; Shan Lu; Shanshan Wang

As the epidemic exacerbates, if the government began to intervene by a series of emergency measures, where a disease prevention and control system will be quickly established, the daily infection rate K t will significantly decrease. Usually, the new daily confirmed cases will begin to decline as well. During the epidemic prevention and control process, once the situation improves, we will see the emergence of the first turning point denoted as T 1 . Then after the data T 1 , the newly diagnosed patients E t changes from a rapid rise in the outbreak period to a descending channel (E t < E t−1 ). In summary, the emergence of the first turning point T 1 indicates that the disease control measures have begun to work, which implies the end of the "Outbreak Period".