Estimating the COVID-19 epidemic trajectory and hospital capacity requirements in South West England: a mathematical modelling framework

Objectives To develop a regional model of COVID-19 dynamics for use in estimating the number of infections, deaths and required acute and intensive care (IC) beds using the South West England (SW) as an example case. Design Open-source age-structured variant of a susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered compartmental mathematical model. Latin hypercube sampling and maximum likelihood estimation were used to calibrate to cumulative cases and cumulative deaths. Setting SW at a time considered early in the pandemic, where National Health Service authorities required evidence to guide localised planning and support decision-making. Participants Publicly available data on patients with COVID-19. Primary and secondary outcome measures The expected numbers of infected cases, deaths due to COVID-19 infection, patient occupancy of acute and IC beds and the reproduction (‘R’) number over time. Results SW model projections indicate that, as of 11 May 2020 (when ‘lockdown’ measures were eased), 5793 (95% credible interval (CrI) 2003 to 12 051) individuals were still infectious (0.10% of the total SW population, 95% CrI 0.04% to 0.22%), and a total of 189 048 (95% CrI 141 580 to 277 955) had been infected with the virus (either asymptomatically or symptomatically), but recovered, which is 3.4% (95% CrI 2.5% to 5.0%) of the SW population. The total number of patients in acute and IC beds in the SW on 11 May 2020 was predicted to be 701 (95% CrI 169 to 1543) and 110 (95% CrI 8 to 464), respectively. The R value in SW was predicted to be 2.6 (95% CrI 2.0 to 3.2) prior to any interventions, with social distancing reducing this to 2.3 (95% CrI 1.8 to 2.9) and lockdown/school closures further reducing the R value to 0.6 (95% CrI 0.5 to 0.7). Conclusions The developed model has proved a valuable asset for regional healthcare services. The model will be used further in the SW as the pandemic evolves, and—as open-source software—is portable to healthcare systems in other geographies.