Comparative Medicine and Bioimage Centre of Catalonia (CMCiB), Fundació Institut d'Investigació en Ciències de la Salut Germans Trias i Pujol, Badalona, Catalonia, Spain.
Department of Physics, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
PLoS Comput Biol. 2020 Dec 9;16(12):e1008431. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1008431. eCollection 2020 Dec.
The appearance and fast spreading of Covid-19 took the international community by surprise. Collaboration between researchers, public health workers, and politicians has been established to deal with the epidemic. One important contribution from researchers in epidemiology is the analysis of trends so that both the current state and short-term future trends can be carefully evaluated. Gompertz model has been shown to correctly describe the dynamics of cumulative confirmed cases, since it is characterized by a decrease in growth rate showing the effect of control measures. Thus, it provides a way to systematically quantify the Covid-19 spreading velocity and it allows short-term predictions and longer-term estimations. This model has been employed to fit the cumulative cases of Covid-19 from several European countries. Results show that there are systematic differences in spreading velocity among countries. The model predictions provide a reliable picture of the short-term evolution in countries that are in the initial stages of the Covid-19 outbreak, and may permit researchers to uncover some characteristics of the long-term evolution. These predictions can also be generalized to calculate short-term hospital and intensive care units (ICU) requirements.
新冠疫情的出现和迅速传播令国际社会猝不及防。研究人员、公共卫生工作者和政治家之间已经建立了合作关系，以应对这一流行病。传染病学研究人员的一个重要贡献是对趋势进行分析，以便仔细评估当前状况和短期未来趋势。戈珀特兹模型已被证明能够正确描述累积确诊病例的动态，因为它的特征是增长率下降，显示出控制措施的效果。因此，它提供了一种系统地量化新冠病毒传播速度的方法，并允许进行短期预测和长期估计。该模型已被用于拟合来自几个欧洲国家的累积新冠病例。结果表明，各国之间的传播速度存在系统性差异。该模型的预测为处于新冠疫情初始阶段的国家的短期演变提供了可靠的图景，并可能使研究人员发现长期演变的一些特征。这些预测还可以推广到计算短期医院和重症监护病房（ICU）的需求。
