Individual-level Modeling of COVID-19 Epidemic Risk

Abstract: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic calls for a multi-faceted public health response comprising complementary interventions to control the spread of the disease while vaccines and therapies are developed. Many of these interventions need to be informed by epidemic risk predictions given available data, including symptoms, contact patterns, and environmental factors. Here we propose a novel probabilistic formalism based on Individual-Level Models (ILMs) that offers rigorous formulas for the probability of infection of individuals, which can be parameterised via Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) applied on compartmental models defined at the population level. We describe an approach where individual data collected in real-time is integrated with overall case counts to update the a predictor of the susceptibility of infection as a function of individual risk factors.