Implication of Reported Viral Hepatitis Incidence Rate Change in Hubei Province, China, between 2004-2010

This study examined the change of reported incidence rate for viral hepatitis in Hubei province, China, between 2004 to 2010 to provide scientific evidence for viral hepatitis control. Reported viral hepatitis infection cases were queried from Centre for Disease Control of Hubei Province, China. The incidence of viral hepatitis A decreased steadily across the study period. Viral hepatitis B composed 85% of the viral hepatitis cases. When reported incidence rates for chronic hepatitis B increased, the rates of acute and unclassified cases dropped from 2005 to 2010. The reported viral hepatitis B incidence rate for males was around 1.5-2 times higher than for females. The average annual percentage change of reported viral hepatitis B incidence rates was 4%. The same index for viral hepatitis C was 28%. The reported viral hepatitis B incidence rate of people under 20 years old declined over the period. This decrease was mainly attributed to the recent implementation of vaccination plan. Reported incidence rate of viral hepatitis E also rose in those years. Having a better understanding on reported incidence rates of the present surveillance system is important for developing strategies for further prevention of viral hepatitis. In addition, the data showed that a surveillance system that differentiates new and former infected cases will be more effective in providing evidence for disease control.

Reconstruction of incidence reporting rate for SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant of COVID-19 pandemic in the US

In recent years,advanced regularization techniques have emerged as a powerful tool aimed at stable estimation of infectious disease parameters that are crucial for future projections,prevention,and control.Unlike other system parameters,i.e.,incubation and recovery rates,the case reporting rate,Ψ,and the time-dependent effective reproduction number,R_(e)t,are directly influenced by a large number of factors making it impossible to pre-estimate these parameters in any meaningful way.In this study,we propose a novel iteratively-regularized trust-region optimization algorithm,combined with SuSvIuIvRD compartmental model,for stable reconstruction ofΨand R_(e)t from reported epidemic data on vaccination percentages,incidence cases,and daily deaths.The innovative regularization procedure exploits(and takes full advantage of)a unique structure of the Jacobian and Hessian approximation for the nonlinear observation operator.The proposed inversion method is thoroughly tested with synthetic and real SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant data for different regions in the United States of America from July 9,2021,to November 25,2021.Our study shows that case reporting rate during the Delta wave of COVID-19 pandemic in the US is between 12%and 37%,with most states being in the range from 15%to 25%.This confirms earlier accounts on considerable under-reporting of COVID-19 cases due to the impact of”silent spreaders”and the limitations of testing.

Analysis of State Homicide Rates Using Statistical Ranking and Selection Procedures

Nonparametric and parametric subset selection procedures are used in the analysis of state homicide rates (SHRs), for the year 2005 and years 2014-2020, to identify subsets of states that contain the “best” (lowest SHR) and “worst” (highest SHR) rates with a prescribed probability. A new Bayesian model is developed and applied to the SHR data and the results are contrasted with those obtained with the subset selection procedures. All analyses are applied within the context of a two-way block design.