988033 - Predicting the Near Future County-Level COVID-19 Pandemic Trend Under Lockdown and Reopen Scenarios (Student Poster 15)

COVID-19 pandemic had expanded to the US since early 2020 and has caused nationwide economic loss and public health crisis. Until now, several states have experienced multiple times mandatory lockdowns and reopens to control the spread and transmission of COVID-19. To provide a quantitative reference for official strategies, predicting the near future trend based on presumed scenarios such as lockdown and reopen with different phases are urgently needed. In this study, the first attempted COVID-19 case predicting model based on county-level demographic, environmental, and community mobility data was constructed with multiple machine learning techniques and a hybrid framework. Different scenarios were also applied to selected metropolitan counties including New York City, Cook County in Illinois, Los Angeles County in California, and Miami-Dade County in Florida to assess the impact from lockdown, Phase I, and Phase III re-opening.
Our results showed that, for selected counties, the mobility decreased substantially after the lockdown but kept increasing with an apparent weekly pattern which was significantly related with the increasing trend of the local incidence rate. The weekly pattern of mobility and infections also implied high infections during the weekend. Meanwhile, the scenario assessment results indicated that compared with Phase I re-opening, a 1-week and a 2-week continuous lockdown after the lockdown could reduce 4%-29% and 15%-55% infections, respectively, in the future week, while 2-week Phase III re-opening after the lockdown could increase 16%-80% infections. We concluded that the mandatory orders in metropolitan counties such as lockdown should last longer than one week, the effect could be observed. In future works, we expect to involve a longer period of data, consider more county-dependent factors, and employ more sophisticated techniques to decrease the modeling uncertainty and apply it to counties nationally and other countries.