Tips for Forecasting Covid-19 Therapies
Written March 2021.
Learn more about our tips for forecasting Covid-19 therapies. Tip 1: It is best to take a patient-based approach…
It is best to take a patient-based approach – focus on new cases and define the target patient against the therapy profile.
Use an incidence-based model (not prevalence based) – to model Covid therapies for the initial onset of Covid. When modelling, look at the number of new patients, and how many receive treatment.
Remember, every country is unique – everywhere is behaving differently, with different adoptions of lockdowns, civil obedience, vaccine uptake, and disease waves. Even from city to city, different healthcare systems are seeing different impacts.
Take a judgement-based approach – Covid’s unpredictable nature evokes less confidence in statistical and mathematical models as these are often based on years of data which is simply not available. We only have weeks of reliable data, not years. Epidemiology is also changing rapidly, so we should not rely entirely on data.
Refine the data to define your target population size – the John Hopkins University offers good weekly data, to be used as a starting point in your forecast but defining your patients more specifically than just new cases of Covid will enable you to have more of a robust forecast.
