The Scottish Government produce projections and scenarios for the number of infections and other measures in Scotland. These projections are done in two parts. Firstly an epidemiological model is used to predict the number of new infections. This projection is then split down by age group, and a second (logistics) model is applied to predict the number of people that will go to hospital, and potentially to ICU, based on what we know about how different age groups react to the disease.
The main information feeding into our logistics model is:
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our estimates of the number of people that will be infected with Covid;
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data-based assumptions for the proportion of those that will experience different severities of the disease;
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the amount of time it takes for infected people to reach different stages of the disease;
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the length of time they are at each stage.
To model the people becoming more severely ill and therefore needing hospital treatment, we use assumptions for the proportion of people likely to require hospital treatment and the timeline of their disease.
The length of time we assume people stay in hospital is based on length of stay distributions for viral pneumonia, with adjustments for Covid. Again, these lengths of stay are age dependent, with younger people likely to have shorter stays than older people.
The logistical model developed by Scottish Government to assess implications for health care demand also produces a medium-term projection of infections. This projection is submitted to SPI-M and informs the consensus for daily incidence. The Scottish Government then use Scottish Government modelling if it sits within the SPI-M consensus, informed by several groups, to develop central, better and worse ends for national incidence, Hospital Bed, ICU demand and deaths.
This model has been peer reviewed by the University of Edinburgh.
This model is one of a series used by the Scottish Government during the pandemic to model the spread and levels of Covid-19 in Scotland. Many of the results of these models have been published in the Modelling the Epidemic series of reports.
If you have any questions regarding the contents of this repository, please contact sgcentralanalysisdivision@gov.scot.
This repository is available under the Open Government Licence v3.0.