Nowcasting pandemic influenza A/H1N1 2009 hospitalizations in the Netherlands
- نوع فایل : کتاب
- زبان : انگلیسی
- مؤلف : Tjibbe Donker Michiel van Boven W. Marijn van Ballegooijen Tessa M. van’t Klooster Cornelia C. Wielders Jacco Wallinga
- چاپ و سال / کشور: 2011
Description
During emerging epidemics of infectious diseases, it is vital to have up-to-date information on epidemic trends, such as incidence or health care demand, because hospitals and intensive care units have limited excess capacity. However, real-time tracking of epidemics is difficult, because of the inherent delay between onset of symptoms or hospitalizations, and reporting. We propose a robust algorithm to correct for reporting delays, using the observed distribution of reporting delays. We apply the algorithm to pandemic influenza A/H1N1 2009 hospitalizations as reported in the Netherlands. We show that the proposed algorithm is able to provide unbiased predictions of the actual number of hospitalizations in real-time during the ascent and descent of the epidemic. The real-time predictions of admissions are useful to adjust planning in hospitals to avoid exceeding their capacity
Eur J Epidemiol (2011) 26:195–201 DOI 10.1007/s10654-011-9566-5 Received: 17 January 2011 / Accepted: 7 March 2011 / Published online: 18 March 2011
