Journal article
Forecasting COVID-19 activity in Australia to support pandemic response: May to October 2020
R Moss, DJ Price, N Golding, P Dawson, J McVernon, RJ Hyndman, FM Shearer, JM McCaw
Scientific Reports | Published : 2023
Abstract
As of January 2021, Australia had effectively controlled local transmission of COVID-19 despite a steady influx of imported cases and several local, but contained, outbreaks in 2020. Throughout 2020, state and territory public health responses were informed by weekly situational reports that included an ensemble forecast of daily COVID-19 cases for each jurisdiction. We present here an analysis of one forecasting model included in this ensemble across the variety of scenarios experienced by each jurisdiction from May to October 2020. We examine how successfully the forecasts characterised future case incidence, subject to variations in data timeliness and completeness, showcase how we adapte..
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Awarded by National Health and Medical Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System data on COVID-19 were provided by the Office of Health Protection and Response, Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, on behalf of the Communicable Diseases Network Australia (CDNA). We thank public health staff from incident emergency operations centres in state and territory health departments, and the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, along with state and territory public health laboratories. We thank members of CDNA for their feedback and perspectives on the study results. We thank Craig Dalton, Sandra Carlson, and the Flutracking team for sharing their insights and Flutracking survey data throughout the study. We thank the Flutracking participants who made the time each week to complete the surveys and contribute to COVID-19 surveillance. This research was supported by use of the Nectar Research Cloud, a collaborative Australian research platform supported by the NCRIS-funded Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), and by the University of Melbourne's Research Computing Services. This work was directly funded by the Australian Government Department of Health. Additional support was provided by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia through its Centres of Research Excellence (SPECTRUM, GNT1170960) and Investigator Grant Schemes (JMcV Principal Research Fellowship, GNT1117140).