In order to design effective public health policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, local governments and organizations must be able to forecast the expected number of cases in their area. Although researchers have developed individual models for predicting COVID-19 based on sensor data without requiring a test, less research has been conducted on how to leverage those individual predictions in forecasting virus spread for determining hierarchical predictions from the community level to the state level. The Multi-Level Adaptive and Dynamic Biosensor Epidemic Model, or m-ADBio, is designed to improve on the traditional SEIR model used to forecast the spread of COVID-19. In this study, the predictive performance of m-ADBio is examined at the state, county, and community levels through numerical experimentation. We find that the model improves over SEIR at all levels, but especially at the community level, where the m-ADBio model with sensor-based initial values yielded no statistically significant difference between the forecasted cases and the true observed data -meaning that the model was highly accurate. Therefore, the m-ADBio model is expected to provide a more timely and accurate forecast to help policymakers optimize pandemic management strategy.

The impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic has required governments across the world to develop effective public health policies using epidemiological models. Unfortunately, as a result of limited testing ability, these models often rely on lagged rather than real-time data, and cannot be adapted to small geographies to provide localized forecasts. This study proposes ADBio, a multi-level adaptive and dynamic biosensor-based model that can be used to predict the risk of infection with COVID-19 from the individual level to the county level, providing more timely and accurate estimates of virus exposure at all levels. The model is evaluated using diagnosis simulation based on current COVID-19 cases as well as GPS movement data for Massachusetts and New York, where COVID-19 hotspots had previously been observed. Results demonstrate that lagged testing data is indeed a major detriment to current modeling efforts, and that unlike the standard SEIR model, ADBio is able to adapt to arbitrarily small geographic regions and provide reasonable forecasts of COVID-19 cases. The features of this model enable greater national pandemic preparedness and provide local town and county governments a valuable tool for decision-making during a pandemic.