Assessing the accuracy of California county level COVID-19 hospitalization forecasts to inform public policy decision making

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of infectious disease forecasting in informing public policy. However, significant barriers remain for effectively linking infectious disease forecasts to public health decision making, including a lack of model validation. Forecasting model performance...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:BMC public health 2023-04, Vol.23 (1), p.782-782, Article 782
Main Authors: White, Lauren A, McCorvie, Ryan, Crow, David, Jain, Seema, León, Tomás M
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
California - epidemiology
Communicable Diseases - epidemiology
Control
COVID-19
COVID-19 - epidemiology
Decision Making
Epidemics
Forecasting
Health aspects
Health behavior
Hospital care
Hospitalization
Humans
Infectious disease modeling
Model evaluation
Pandemics
Prevention
Public health
Public Policy
Retrospective Studies
SARS-CoV-2
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of infectious disease forecasting in informing public policy. However, significant barriers remain for effectively linking infectious disease forecasts to public health decision making, including a lack of model validation. Forecasting model performance and accuracy should be evaluated retrospectively to understand under which conditions models were reliable and could be improved in the future. Using archived forecasts from the California Department of Public Health's California COVID Assessment Tool ( https://calcat.covid19.ca.gov/cacovidmodels/ ), we compared how well different forecasting models predicted COVID-19 hospitalization census across California counties and regions during periods of Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variant predominance. Based on mean absolute error estimates, forecasting models had variable performance across counties and through time. When accounting for model availability across counties and dates, some individual models performed consistently better than the ensemble model, but model rankings still differed across counties. Local transmission trends, variant prevalence, and county population size were informative predictors for determining which model performed best for a given county based on a random forest classification analysis. Overall, the ensemble model performed worse in less populous counties, in part because of fewer model contributors in these locations. Ensemble model predictions could be improved by incorporating geographic heterogeneity in model coverage and performance. Consistency in model reporting and improved model validation can strengthen the role of infectious disease forecasting in real-time public health decision making.
ISSN:1471-2458
1471-2458
DOI:10.1186/s12889-023-15649-0