Roth Idan, Yosef Arthur
Department of Information Systems, Tel Aviv-Yaffo Academic College, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel.
Digit Health. 2024 Aug 18;10:20552076241272565. doi: 10.1177/20552076241272565. eCollection 2024 Jan-Dec.
The COVID-19 outbreak compelled countries to take swift actions across various domains amidst substantial uncertainties. In Israel, significant COVID-19-related efforts were assigned to the Israeli Home Front Command (HFC). HFC faced the challenge of anticipating adequate resources to efficiently and timely manage its numerous assignments despite the absence of a COVID-19 spread forecast. This paper describes the initiative of a group of motivated, though nonexpert, people to provide the needed COVID-19 rate of spread of the epidemic forecasts.
To address this challenge, the Planning Chamber, reporting to the HFC Medical Commander, undertook the task of mapping HFC healthcare challenges and resource requirements. The nonexpert team continuously collected public COVID-19-related data published by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MoH) of verified cases, light cases, mild cases, serious condition cases, life-support cases, and deaths, and despite lacking expertise in statistics and healthcare and having no sophisticated statistical packages, generated forecasts using Microsoft Excel.
The analysis methods and applications successfully demonstrated the desired outcome of the lockdown by showing a transition from exponential to polynomial growth in the spread of the virus. These forecasting activities enabled decision-makers to manage resources effectively, supporting the HFC's operations during the pandemic.
Nonexpert forecasting may become a necessity and be beneficial, and similar analysis efforts can be easily replicated in future events. However, they are inherently short-lived and should persist only until knowledge centers can bridge the expertise gap. It is crucial to identify major events, such as lockdowns, during forecasting due to their potential impact on spread rates. Despite the expertise gap, the Planning Chamber's approach provided valuable resource management insights for HFC's COVID-19 response.
新冠疫情的爆发迫使各国在诸多重大不确定性因素下迅速在各个领域采取行动。在以色列，与新冠疫情相关的重大工作被分配给了以色列后方司令部（HFC）。尽管缺乏新冠疫情传播预测，但HFC仍面临着预测充足资源以高效、及时管理其众多任务的挑战。本文描述了一群积极主动但并非专业人士的团队提供所需的新冠疫情传播率预测的举措。
为应对这一挑战，向HFC医疗指挥官汇报工作的规划室承担了梳理HFC医疗挑战和资源需求的任务。这个非专业团队持续收集以色列卫生部（MoH）公布的与新冠疫情相关的公共数据，包括确诊病例、轻症病例、普通病例、重症病例、生命支持病例和死亡病例，并且尽管缺乏统计学和医疗专业知识，也没有复杂的统计软件包，但仍使用微软Excel进行预测。
分析方法和应用通过展示病毒传播从指数增长向多项式增长的转变，成功证明了封锁措施的预期效果。这些预测活动使决策者能够有效管理资源，在疫情期间支持了HFC的行动。
非专业预测可能成为必要且有益的方式，类似的分析工作在未来事件中可以轻松复制。然而，它们本质上是短期的，应持续到知识中心能够弥合专业知识差距为止。在预测过程中识别重大事件（如封锁）至关重要，因为它们可能对传播率产生潜在影响。尽管存在专业知识差距，但规划室的方法为HFC应对新冠疫情提供了宝贵的资源管理见解。
