ArticleBiology letters2021
Early warning signal reliability varies with COVID-19 waves.
Article in Biology letters, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed.
- Challenges in strengthening sentinel surveillance network during COVID-19 pandemic in Africa.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Identifying COVID-19 peaks using early warning signals.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Do early warning signals of tipping points lead to better decisions?Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Early detection of disease outbreaks and non-outbreaks using incidence data: A framework using feature-based time series classification and machine learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Early warning signals do not predict a warming-induced experimental epidemic.PLOS global public health · 2025Article
- A Low-Cost Early Warning Method for Infectious Diseases with Asymptomatic Carriers.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Anticipating regime shifts by mixing early warning signals from different nodes.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Application of early warning signs to physiological contexts: a comparison of multivariate indices in patients on long-term hemodialysis.Frontiers in network physiology · 2024Article
- Early warning signals have limited applicability to empirical lake data.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Understanding the leading indicators of hospital admissions from COVID-19 across successive waves in the UK.Epidemiology and infection · 2023Article
- Simple methods for early warnings of COVID-19 surges: Lessons learned from 21 months of wastewater and clinical data collection in Detroit, Michigan, United States.The Science of the total environment · 2023Article
- Using digital traces to build prospective and real-time county-level early warning systems to anticipate COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States.Science advances · 2023Article
- The potential of resilience indicators to anticipate infectious disease outbreaks, a systematic review and guide.PLOS global public health · 2023Article
- Performance of early warning signals for disease re-emergence: A case study on COVID-19 data.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Early warning signal reliability varies with COVID-19 waves.Biology letters · 2021Article
- A Bioinformatics Tool for Predicting Future COVID-19 Waves Based on a Retrospective Analysis of the Second Wave in India: Model Development Study.JMIR bioinformatics and biotechnologyArticle
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Early warning signals (EWSs) aim to predict changes in complex systems from phenomenological signals in time series data. These signals have recently been shown to precede the emergence of disease outbreaks, offering hope that policymakers can make predictive rather than reactive management decisions. Here, using a novel, sequential analysis in combination with daily COVID-19 case data across 24 countries, we suggest that composite EWSs consisting of variance, autocorrelation and skewness can predict nonlinear case increases, but that the predictive ability of these tools varies between waves based upon the degree of critical slowing down present. Our work suggests that in highly monitored disease time series such as COVID-19, EWSs offer the opportunity for policymakers to improve the accuracy of urgent intervention decisions but best characterize hypothesized critical transitions.
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