App-based COVID-19 syndromic surveillance and prediction of hospital admissions in COVID Symptom Study Sweden

Beatrice Kennedy, Hugo Fitipaldi, Ulf Hammar, Marlena Maziarz, Neli Tsereteli, Nikolay Oskolkov, Georgios Varotsis, Camilla A. Franks, Diem Nguyen, Lampros Spiliopoulos, Hans Olov Adami, Jonas Björk, Stefan Engblom, Katja Fall, Anna Grimby-Ekman, Jan Eric Litton, Mats Martinell, Anna Oudin, Torbjörn Sjöström, Toomas TimpkaCarole H. Sudre, Mark S. Graham, Julien Lavigne du Cadet, Andrew T. Chan, Richard Davies, Sajaysurya Ganesh, Anna May, Sébastien Ourselin, Joan Capdevila Pujol, Somesh Selvachandran, Jonathan Wolf, Tim D. Spector, Claire J. Steves, Maria F. Gomez, Paul W. Franks, Tove Fall

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Scopus citations

Abstract

The app-based COVID Symptom Study was launched in Sweden in April 2020 to contribute to real-time COVID-19 surveillance. We enrolled 143,531 study participants (≥18 years) who contributed 10.6 million daily symptom reports between April 29, 2020 and February 10, 2021. Here, we include data from 19,161 self-reported PCR tests to create a symptom-based model to estimate the individual probability of symptomatic COVID-19, with an AUC of 0.78 (95% CI 0.74–0.83) in an external dataset. These individual probabilities are employed to estimate daily regional COVID-19 prevalence, which are in turn used together with current hospital data to predict next week COVID-19 hospital admissions. We show that this hospital prediction model demonstrates a lower median absolute percentage error (MdAPE: 25.9%) across the five most populated regions in Sweden during the first pandemic wave than a model based on case notifications (MdAPE: 30.3%). During the second wave, the error rates are similar. When we apply the same model to an English dataset, not including local COVID-19 test data, we observe MdAPEs of 22.3% and 19.0% during the first and second pandemic waves, respectively, highlighting the transferability of the prediction model.

Original languageEnglish
Article number2110
JournalNature Communications
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 2022
Externally publishedYes

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