Global COVID-19 Pandemic Waves: Limited Lessons Learned Worldwide over the Past Year

作者：Yongyue Wei, Jinxing Guan, Xiao Ning, Yuelin Li, Liangmin Wei, Sipeng Shen, Ruyang Zhang, Yang Zhao, Hongbing Shen, Feng Chen · 发表于：Engineering · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1016/j.eng.2021.07.015 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：COVID-19 epidemiological studies、COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts、SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 Research

The occurrence of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was followed by a small burst of cases around the world; afterward, due to a series of emergency non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), the increasing number of confirmed cases slowed down in many countries. However, the lifting of control measures by the government and the public’s loosening of precautionary behaviors led to a sudden increase in cases, arousing deep concern across the globe. arousing deep concern across the globe. This study evaluates the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries and territories worldwide from January 2020 to February 2021. According to the time-varying reproduction number (R(t)) of each country or territory, the results show that almost half of the countries and territories in the world have never controlled the epidemic. Among the countries and territories that had once contained the occurrence, nearly half failed to maintain their prevention and control, causing the COVID-19 pandemic to rebound across the world—resulting in even higher waves in half of the rebounding countries or territories. This work also proposes and uses a time-varying country-level transmission risk score (CTRS), which takes into account both R(t) and daily new cases, to demonstrate country-level or territory-level transmission potential and trends. Time-varying hierarchical clustering of time-varying CTRS values was used to successfully reveal the countries and territories that contributed to the recent a...