A partnership led by the University of California-Irvine has unveiled another resource on the coronavirus pandemic in Orange County, with a new focus on tracking the spread of the disease and forecasting future trends.
The website, released this week, estimates “current and future numbers of infectious individuals in Orange County, which is important for understanding risks of getting infected,” said Vladimir Minin, UCI professor of statistics and associate director of the UCI Infectious Disease Science Initiative.
The website, developed in partnership with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Orange County Health Care Agency, estimates how many coronavirus infections actually occurred rather than the number of infections reported, how many infectious individuals Orange County has on any given day and how quickly the virus is spreading.
The researchers in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Science also produce short-term forecasts of COVID-19 deaths, which are slated to continue to decline in the next month.
The report, which covers July 28 through Sept. 1., shows that the infection rate is declining in Orange County, with an effective reproduction number—the rate at which infections are growing or declining—below 1, meaning the area “is successfully suppressing coronavirus spread.”
The project is the second coronavirus-focused website UCI has developed in response to the pandemic, with the university releasing a public online database last month about the virus in the county that provides comparisons with neighboring California counties.
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