Phys.org June 15, 2021
An international team of researchers (Kuwait, USA – NIST, Saudi Arabia) has developed a susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model (SEIR) with a vaccination compartment proposed to simulate theCOVID-19 spread in Saudi Arabia. The model considers seven stages of infection: susceptible (S), exposed (E), infectious (I), quarantined (Q), recovered (R), deaths (D), and vaccinated (V). As numerical models can be subject to various sources of uncertainties, they used the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) to constrain the model outputs and its parameters with available data. They conducted joint state-parameters estimation experiments assimilating daily data into the proposed model using the EnKF to enhance the model’s forecasting skills. Starting from the estimated set of model parameters they conducted short-term predictions to assess the predictability range of the model. They applied the proposed assimilation system on real data sets from Saudi Arabia. The numerical results demonstrated the capability of the model in achieving accurate prediction of the epidemic development up to two-week time scales…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE