Spatiotemporal dynamics in demography-sensitive disease transmission: COVID-19 spread in NY as a case study

Abstract: The rapid transmission of the highly contagious novel coronavirus has been represented through several data-guided approaches across targeted geographies, in an attempt to understand when the pandemic will be under control and imposed lockdown measures can be relaxed. However, these epidemiological models predominantly based on training data employing number of cases and fatalities are limited in that they do not account for the spatiotemporal population dynamics that principally contributes to the disease spread. Here, a stochastic cellular automata enabled predictive model is presented that is able to accurate describe the effect of demography-dependent population dynamics on disease transmission. Using the spread of coronavirus in the state of New York as a case study, results from the computational framework remarkably agree with the actual count for infected cases and deaths as reported across organizations. The predictions suggest that an extended lockdown in some form, for up to 180 days, can significantly reduce the risk of a second wave of the outbreak. In addition, increased availability of medical testing is able to reduce the number of infected patients, even when less stringent social distancing guidelines and imposed. Equipping this stochastic approach with demographic factors such as age ratio, pre-existing health conditions, robustifies the model to predict the transmittivity of future outbreaks before they transform into an epidemic.