Speaker:

Xihong Lin Department of Biostatistics and Department of Statistics Harvard University

Abstract:

COVID-19 is an emerging respiratory infectious disease that has become a pandemic. It was first detected in early December 2019 in Wuhan, China. Until April 30, COVID-19 has quickly spread to over 150 countries worldwide and infected more than 3.3 million individuals and caused 237,000 deaths globally. In this talk, I will first provide a historical overview of the epidemic in Wuhan. I will then provide the analysis results of 32,000 lab-confirmed COVID-19 cases in Wuhan to evaluate the effects of different public health interventions on controlling the COVID-19 outbreak, such as social distancing, isolation and quarantine, as well as summarizing the epidemiological characteristics of the cases. The results show that multi-faceted intervention measures effected successfully controlled the outbreak in Wuhan. I will next present the effects of the social distancing measure using the data in Wuhan, USA and Europe on controlling the epidemic and the factors that are useful to consider for reopening. Strategies and challenges for different types of tests, such as PCR and antibody tests, and contacting tracing will be discussed. Preliminary survey results of >500,000 participants of the HowWeFeel project on symptoms and health conditions in US will be presented. I will provide several take home messages and discuss priorities.