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Record W4412441414 · doi:10.1016/j.epidem.2025.100840

Learning associations of COVID-19 hospitalizations with wastewater viral signals by Markov modulated models

2025· article· en· W4412441414 on OpenAlex
Katy Peng, C. B. Dean, X. Joan Hu, Robert Delatolla

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.

Bibliographic record

VenueEpidemics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicSARS-CoV-2 detection and testing
Canadian institutionsWilfrid Laurier UniversityUniversity of OttawaUniversity of WaterlooSimon Fraser University
FundersCanadian Statistical Sciences InstituteCentre Hospitalier pour Enfants de l'est de l'Ontario
KeywordsCoronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)2019-20 coronavirus outbreakVirologyCoronavirus InfectionsPandemicBetacoronavirusMedicineGeographyBiologyComputational biologyInfectious disease (medical specialty)Internal medicineDiseaseOutbreak

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Recent research highlights a strong correlation between COVID-19 hospitalizations and wastewater viral signals. Increases in wastewater viral signals may be early warnings of increases in hospital admissions. That indicates a promising opportunity to assess and predict the burden of infectious diseases and has driven the widespread adoption and development of wastewater monitoring tools by public health organizations. Previous studies utilize distributed lag models to explore associations of COVID-19 hospitalizations with lagged SARS-CoV-2 wastewater viral signals. However, the conventional distributed lag models assume the duration time of the lag to be fixed, which is not always plausible. This paper presents Markov-modulated models with distributed lasting time, treating the duration of the lag as a random variable defined by a hidden process. We evaluate exposure effects over the duration time and estimate the distribution of the lasting time using the wastewater data and COVID-19 hospitalization records from Ottawa, Canada during June 2020 to November 2022. The different COVID-19 pandemic waves are accommodated in the statistical learning. Moreover, two strategies for comparing the associations over different time intervals are exemplified using the Ottawa data. Of note, the proposed Markov modulated models, an extension of distributed lag models, are potentially applicable to many different problems where the lag time is not fixed.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.677
Threshold uncertainty score0.426

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.034
GPT teacher head0.318
Teacher spread0.283 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it