Early detection of new pandemic waves. Control chart and a new surveillance index

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the pressing need for constant surveillance, updating of the response plan in post-peak periods and readiness for the possibility of new waves of the pandemic. A short initial period of steady rise in the number of new cases is sometimes followed by one of exponential growth. Systematic public health surveillance of the pandemic should signal an alert in the event of change in epidemic activity within the community to inform public health policy makers of the need to control a potential outbreak. The goal of this study is to improve infectious disease surveillance by complementing standardized metrics with a new surveillance metric to overcome some of their difficulties in capturing the changing dynamics of the pandemic. At statistically-founded threshold values, the new measure will trigger alert signals giving early warning of the onset of a new pandemic wave. We define a new index, the weighted cumulative incidence index, based on the daily new-case count. We model the infection spread rate at two levels, inside and outside homes, which explains the overdispersion observed in the data. The seasonal component of real data, due to the public surveillance system, is incorporated into the statistical analysis. Probabilistic analysis enables the construction of a Control Chart for monitoring index variability and setting automatic alert thresholds for new pandemic waves. Both the new index and the control chart have been implemented with the aid of a computational tool developed in R, and used daily by the Navarre Government (Spain) for virus propagation surveillance during post-peak periods. Automated monitoring generates daily reports showing the areas whose control charts issue an alert. The new index reacts sooner to data trend changes preluding new pandemic waves, than the standard surveillance index based on the 14-day notification rate of reported COVID-19 cases per 100,000 population.