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

To cope with these challenges, we propose a simple and effective framework incorporating the effectiveness of the government control to forecast the whole process of a new unknown infectious disease in its early-outbreak, from which we emphasis on the prediction of meaningful milepost moments. Specifically, we first propose a series of iconic indicators to characterize the extent of epidemic spread, and describe four periods of the whole process corresponding to the four meaningful milepost moments: two turning points and two "zero" points; then we develop the proposed procedure with mild and reasonable assumption, especially without relying on an assumption of epidemiological parameters for disease progression. Finally we apply it to analyze and evaluate the COVID-19 using the public available data in mainland China beyond Hubei Province from the China CDC during the period of Jan 29th, 2020, to Feb 29th, 2020, which shows the effectiveness of the proposed procedure.