The disutility of compartmental model forecasts during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, several forecasting models were released to predict the spread of the virus along variables vital for public health policymaking. Of these, the susceptible–infected–recovered (SIR) compartmental model was the most common. In this paper, we investigated the forecasting performance of The University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium SIR model. We considered the following daily outcomes: hospitalizations, ICU patients, and deaths. We evaluated the overall forecasting performance, highlighted some stark forecast biases, and considered forecast errors conditional on different pandemic regimes. We found that this model tends to overforecast over the longer horizons and when there is a surge in viral spread. We bolstered these findings by linking them to faults with the SIR framework itself.

Keywords

• compartmental models
• SIR
• SEIR
• pandemic surveillance
• COVID-19