A0648
Title: Joint modeling of wastewater viral loads and hospitalization dynamics
Authors: Kangyi Peng - Simon Fraser University (Canada) [presenting]
Charmaine Dean - University of Waterloo (Canada)
Xiaoqiong Joan Hu - Simon Fraser University (Canada)
Abstract: It is highly desirable to predict the hospitalizations caused by a particular infectious disease using the associated viral signals in wastewater. Surveillance tools have been employed by public health organizations, and thus, available are the wastewater viral signals and related hospitalization data. On the other hand, the infection process, the drive of the wastewater viral signal, and hospitalization are often not fully observable. The infection is formulated as a hidden Markov process and used to bridge wastewater viral signals and the resulting hospitalization. The modeling starts from the level of individual subjects and then shows how to adapt it to situations with surveillance (aggregated) data. A collection of wastewater viral signals and COVID-19 hospitalization records from Ottawa, Canada, is employed throughout the project for illustration. Notably, the proposed approach is in general applicable for monitoring other infectious diseases through wastewater surveillance systems.
