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This wiki provides technical background information on the Hospitalization Nowcast Hub. It is mainly meant for teams wishing to contribute to the platform.

Background

Seven-day hospitalization incidences have replaced case incidence rates as the central indicator for the steering of the pandemic in Germany (see here for a media article from September 2021). Robert Koch Institute is publishing seven-day hospitalization incidences on a daily basis via its reports, dashboards and a GitHub repository. We make a processed version of these data available in our repository, see Truth data.

As the actual date of hospitalization is often not available, the official seven-day hospitalization incidences are reported by the so-called Meldedatum, which is typically the date at which a person has first been been tested positively for COVID-19. This means that the total number of hospitalizations associated with a given date in this data set only becomes known several weeks later (see here for a media article on these delays).

To make current trends in the the seven-day hospitalization incidence visible and interpretable, the systematic downward bias in the most recent values needs to be corrected. This can be done using so-called nowcasting methods. In this repository, results from different such methods are assembled, compared, evaluated and combined in real time.

Contents of the wiki

• Truth data provides an overview of the seven-day hospitalization incidence data we are using and the pre-processing we have applied.
• Targets describes the nowcast/forecast targets we have defined for this project.
• Data format summarizes the standardized format in which nowcasts need to be submitted.
• Submission describes the submission procedure via GitHub pull requests.
• At submission, a number of automated checks are run to ensure your file is in the right format. Details on these can be found in Validation checks.