Feasibility of very short-term forecast models for COVID-19 hospital-based surveillance

INTRODUCTION:   We evaluated the performance of Bayesian vector autoregressive (BVAR) and Holt’s models to forecast the weekly COVID-19 reported cases in six units of a large hospital.

METHODS:   Cases reported from epidemiologic weeks (EW) 12-37 were selected as the training period, and from EW 38-41 as the test period.

RESULTS:   The models performed well in forecasting cases within one or two weeks following the end of the time-series, but forecasts for a more distant period were inaccurate.

CONCLUSIONS:   Both models offered reasonable performance in very short-term forecasts for confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Keywords:
COVID-19; Coronavirus disease; Forecasting; Statistical models; Epidemiology