Machine learning spatio-temporal epidemiological model to evaluate Germany-county-level COVID-19 risk

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to ravage the world, it is critical to assess the COVID-19 risk timely on multi-scale. To implement it and evaluate the public health policies, we develop a machine learning assisted framework to predict epidemic dynamics from the reported infection data. It contains a county-level spatio-temporal epidemiological model, which combines spatial cellular automata (CA) with time sensitive-undiagnosed-infected-removed (SUIR) model, and is compatible with the existing risk prediction models. The CA-SUIR model shows the multi-scale risk to the public and reveals the transmission modes of coronavirus in different scenarios. Through transfer learning, this new toolbox is used to predict the prevalence of multi-scale COVID-19 in all 412 counties in Germany. A t-day-ahead risk forecast as well as assessment of the non-pharmaceutical intervention policies is presented. We analyzed the situation at Christmas of 2020, and found that the most serious death toll could be 34.5. However, effective policy could control it below 21thousand, which provides a quantitative basis for evaluating the public policies implemented by the government. Such intervening evaluation process would help to improve public health policies and restart the economy appropriately in pandemics. © 2021 The Author(s).