Quickest Detection and Forecast of Pandemic Outbreaks: Analysis of COVID-19 Waves

The COVID-19 pandemic has, worldwide and up to December 2020, caused over 1.7 million deaths, put the world's most advanced healthcare systems under heavy stress. In many countries, drastic restrictive measures adopted by political authorities, such as national lockdowns, have not prevented outbreak of new pandemic's waves. this article, we propose an integrated detection-estimation-forecasting framework that, using publicly available data, is designed to: (i) learn relevant features (e.g., infection rate); (ii) detect quickly possible onset (or termination) exponential growth contagion; (iii) reliably forecast evolution. proposed solution validated analyzing second third waves in USA.