AUTHOR=Sun Tianyi , Jin Baisuo , Wu Yuehua , Bao Junjun 

TITLE=A study of the attenuation stage of a global infectious disease

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Public Health

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1379481

DOI=10.3389/fpubh.2024.1379481

ISSN=2296-2565

ABSTRACT=This article aims to examine the decay stage of global infectious diseases. We demonstrate our method by considering the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020. Since differences in control measures and response speeds between regions may be responsible for the differences in the number of infections, we introduce the concept of the attenuation rate in the varying coefficient SEIR model for measuring the control effect of different cities on the epidemic, and infer it through the Kalman filter. We then apply the varying coefficient SEIR model to 136 cities in China where the total number of confirmed cases exceeded 20 after the implementation of control measures.Subsequent analysis and inference results show that the attenuation rate is significantly related to the local annual GDP and the longitude and latitude of a city or a region. We also apply the varying coefficient SEIR model to other regions outside China. We find that fitted curves of the average simulated daily number of new confirmed cases by the varying coefficient SEIR model are consistent with the real data.