Jonathon Mellor (UKHSA)

Short term forecasting of Acute Respiratory Infections and their impact on NHS hospital pressures for situational awareness over Winter.
 

Mitigations put in place during the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic supressed the transmission of seasonal respiratory viruses. There was an anticipated resurgence of non-COVID-19 seasonal respiratory diseases in Winter 2022-23 which were much harder to predict following extremely low pandemic baselines. These diseases caused an additive burden on healthcare systems, in the context of ongoing COVID-19 waves. We developed modelling methods to short term forecast a range of acute respiratory infections (COVID-19, Influenza, RSV) at a range of geographies and metrics meaningful to healthcare managers. These forecasts used a range of Generalised Additive Models, time series techniques, leading indicators, and ensemble methods to improve assessments of trends.