Simulating and Forecasting the COVID-19 Spread in a U.S. Metropolitan Region with a Spatial SEIR Model

The global COVID-19 pandemic has taken a heavy toll on health, social, and economic costs since the end of 2019. Predicting the spread of a pandemic is essential to developing effective intervention policies. Since the beginning of this pandemic, many models have been developed to predict its pathways. However, the majority of these models assume homogeneous dynamics over the geographic space, while the pandemic exhibits substantial spatial heterogeneity. In addition, spatial interaction among territorial entities and variations in their magnitude impact the pandemic dynamics. In this study, we used a spatial extension of the SEIR-type epidemiological model to simulate and predict the 4-week number of COVID-19 cases in the Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), USA. We incorporated a variety of covariates, including mobility, pharmaceutical, and non-pharmaceutical interventions, demographics, and weather data to improve the model's predictive performance. We predicted the number of COVID-19 cases for up to four weeks in the 10 counties of the studied MSA simultaneously over the time period 29 March 2020 to 13 March 2021, and compared the results with the reported number of cases using the root-mean-squared error (RMSE) metric. Our results highlight the importance of spatial heterogeneity and spatial interactions among locations in COVID-19 pandemic modeling.