Bayesian spatio-temporal joint disease mapping of Covid-19 cases and deaths in local authorities of England
Bayesian spatio-temporal joint disease mapping of Covid-19 cases and deaths in local authorities of England
The overwhelming spatio-temporal nature of the spread of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic demands urgent attention of data analysts and model developers. Modelling results obtained from analytical tool development are essential to understand the ongoing pandemic dynamics with a view to helping the public and policy makers. The pandemic has generated data on a huge number of interesting statistics such as the number of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths in many spatio-temporal resolutions for the analysts to investigate. The multivariate nature of these data sets, along with the inherent spatio-temporal dependencies, poses new challenges for modellers. This article proposes a two-stage hierarchical Bayesian model as a joint bivariate model for the number of cases and deaths observed weekly for the different local authority administrative regions in England. An adaptive model is proposed for the weekly Covid-19 death rates as part of the joint bivariate model. The adaptive model is able to detect possible step changes in death rates in neighbouring areas. The joint model is also used to evaluate the effects of several socio-economic and environmental covariates on the rates of cases and deaths. Inclusion of these covariates points to the presence of a north-south divide in both the case and death rates. Nitrogen dioxide, the only air pollution measure used in the model, is seen to be significantly positively associated with the number cases, even in the presence of the spatio-temporal random effects taking care of spatio-temporal
dependencies present in the data. The proposed models provide excellent fits to the observed data and are seen to perform well for predicting the location specific number of deaths a week in advance. The structure of the models is very general and the same framework can be used for modelling other areally aggregated temporal statistics of the pandemics, e.g. the rate of hospitalisation.
Bayesian space-time modelling, CAR, Covid-19 case rate, Covid-19 death rate, ecological analysis, temporal disease mapping
Sahu, Sujit
33f1386d-6d73-4b60-a796-d626721f72bf
Bohning, Dankmar
1df635d4-e3dc-44d0-b61d-5fd11f6434e1
1 June 2022
Sahu, Sujit
33f1386d-6d73-4b60-a796-d626721f72bf
Bohning, Dankmar
1df635d4-e3dc-44d0-b61d-5fd11f6434e1
Sahu, Sujit and Bohning, Dankmar
(2022)
Bayesian spatio-temporal joint disease mapping of Covid-19 cases and deaths in local authorities of England.
Spatial Statistics, 49, [100519].
(doi:10.1016/j.spasta.2021.100519).
Abstract
The overwhelming spatio-temporal nature of the spread of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic demands urgent attention of data analysts and model developers. Modelling results obtained from analytical tool development are essential to understand the ongoing pandemic dynamics with a view to helping the public and policy makers. The pandemic has generated data on a huge number of interesting statistics such as the number of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths in many spatio-temporal resolutions for the analysts to investigate. The multivariate nature of these data sets, along with the inherent spatio-temporal dependencies, poses new challenges for modellers. This article proposes a two-stage hierarchical Bayesian model as a joint bivariate model for the number of cases and deaths observed weekly for the different local authority administrative regions in England. An adaptive model is proposed for the weekly Covid-19 death rates as part of the joint bivariate model. The adaptive model is able to detect possible step changes in death rates in neighbouring areas. The joint model is also used to evaluate the effects of several socio-economic and environmental covariates on the rates of cases and deaths. Inclusion of these covariates points to the presence of a north-south divide in both the case and death rates. Nitrogen dioxide, the only air pollution measure used in the model, is seen to be significantly positively associated with the number cases, even in the presence of the spatio-temporal random effects taking care of spatio-temporal
dependencies present in the data. The proposed models provide excellent fits to the observed data and are seen to perform well for predicting the location specific number of deaths a week in advance. The structure of the models is very general and the same framework can be used for modelling other areally aggregated temporal statistics of the pandemics, e.g. the rate of hospitalisation.
Text
r1_sptime_covid
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 7 May 2021
e-pub ahead of print date: 12 May 2021
Published date: 1 June 2022
Additional Information:
© 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Bayesian space-time modelling, CAR, Covid-19 case rate, Covid-19 death rate, ecological analysis, temporal disease mapping
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 449153
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/449153
ISSN: 2211-6753
PURE UUID: 878d6d49-ae95-45ed-8ab9-2c556056de8d
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Date deposited: 18 May 2021 16:32
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 06:33
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