An investigation of spatial-temporal patterns and predictions of the COVID-19 pandemic in Colombia, 2020-2021

Colombia announced the first case of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 on March 6, 2020. Since then, the country has reported a total of 4,240,982 cases and 106,544 deaths as of June 30, 2021. This motivates an investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 transmission dynamics at the national and regional level using case incidence data. Mathematical models are employed to estimate the transmission potential and perform short-term forecasts of the COVID-19 epidemic trajectory in Colombia. Furthermore, geographic heterogeneity of COVID-19 in Colombia is examined along with the analysis of mobility and social media trends, showing that the increase in mobility in July 2020 and January 2021 were correlated with surges in case incidence. The estimation of national and regional reproduction numbers shows sustained disease transmission during the early phase of the pandemic, exhibiting sub-exponential growth dynamics. Moreover, most recent estimates of reproduction number are >1.0 at the national and regional levels as of May 30, 2021. Further, the 30-day ahead short-term forecasts obtained from Richards model present a sustained decline in case counts in contrast to the sub-epidemic and GLM model. Nevertheless, our spatial analysis in Colombia shows distinct variations in incidence rate patterns across different departments that can be grouped into four distinct clusters. Lastly, the correlation of social media trends and adherence to social distancing measures is observed by the fact that a spike in the number of tweets indicating the stay-at-home orders was observed in November 2020 when the case incidence had already plateaued.