01.08.2020
As part of the reserach of the World Data Center for Geoinformatics and Sustainable Development project "Foresight COVID-19" team to forecast the spreding of the coronavirus pandemic in Ukraine, the results of the new study "Foresight COVID-19: exacerbation during the adaptive quarantine" are presented.
The study is devoted to predictive modeling of further spread of the disease in Ukraine in the medium term (01.08.2020 –18.08.2020), using different, independent approaches and comparing the results to assess their validity.
The situation with the spread of coronavirus in Ukraine continues to be consistently hard and becomes protracted. The regime of strict quarantine and mobilization of society during March-April 2020 allowed to delay the outbreak of the COVID-19 spread in Ukraine and in some way prepare the country's health care system to actively combat further outbreaks of the disease. At the same time, the moral fatigue of the population from being in isolation, economic factors, the onset of the summer vacation period have significantly changed the conditions for counteracting the spread of coronavirus since the beginning of May 2020. The vast majority of the country's population has returned to a normal lifestyle, neglecting basic means of protection against the disease. As a result, in June-July 2020 there was a series of rapid outbreaks of the disease, which led to a doubling or tripling of the number of daily infected people with a tendency to further increase the disease.
The number of patients after the weakening of the quarantine regime steadily increased. The peak value of patients - 1310 people was reached on July 23, 2020. Volatility has been rising again since the second decade of July and is now at the level of the end of June, and therefore the risks of losing control of the epidemic are growing. The values of the trend strength indicator during July fluctuate around the critical mark of 0.5, which, at first glance, does not indicate a really strong negative trend. However, high volatility and the behavior of the graph of the ratio of the number of new patients and the number of recovering people fully signal a sharp deterioration in the epidemiological situation. The number of infected people is steadily growing, and therefore the risks of further infection of the population and burden on the hospital system are growing.
At the same time, in comparison with European countries, Ukraine has relatively low absolute incidence rates. However, in terms of the growth rate of the number of infected people, Ukraine has a rather negative trend and belongs to the group of countries that have already suffered significantly from the pandemic. The number of regions of Ukraine that do not meet the requirements for quarantine mitigation tends to increase. The Podillya and Polissya regions joined the list, as did the regions of Western Ukraine. There is a high probability of forming a new outbreak in Chernihiv and Sumy regions. The situation remains difficult in Kharkiv and Odesa oblasts. However, there are positive trends in the dynamics for Lviv, Zakarpattia and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, which have reached the plateau of morbidity. Thus, it is possible to indicate the shift of outbreaks from the regions of Western Ukraine to the east and center of the country. Areas of enhanced quarantine measures covered 8 regions of Ukraine, where a total of almost 6 million people live.
Comparing the results obtained using the methods of similarity in mathematical modeling, recurrent neural network (LSTM), Back Propagation Neural Network(BPNN), it should be noted that in the period 02.08.20 - 18.08.20 they have high volatility, clear convergence and indicate a trend of fluctuations in the number of daily infected persons in the range of 800-1500.
Details of the study results can be found at Foresight COVID-19: exacerbation during the adaptive quarantine