Assessing the Pandemic: Caixin Insight Rolls Out Comprehensive Risk Index

Chen Jian is president of CreditWise Technologies and senior adviser to Caixin Insight Group.

The effort to prevent and control the Covid-19 pandemic has entered a “new normal” stage, and the world needs to reopen. The EU has begun to open borders between member countries. Countries and regions where the epidemic has been contained are currently planning to gradually reopen their borders to restore the flow of people, business and goods.

For any country or region to reopen its borders, it is necessary to understand which others are at high-risk and which are at low-risk. To achieve this goal, precise prevention and control policies are needed.

The creation of a Covid-19 comprehensive risk index is an important step to help policymakers make decisions about reopening. This article details the method for compiling the index, mainly including population infection rates, test adequacy, short-term epidemic trends, case fatality rates and other important indicators.

This index was developed by the team of Dr. Chen Jian from CreditWise Technology. The team of professor Wenhong Zhang from Huashan Hospital of Fudan University provided medical consultation. Caixin Data Technology Co. Ltd. provided the underlying data support related to the epidemic. Angu Medical Technology provided technical support for website development.

In the webinar “Prevention and Control Decisions Under Uncertain Epidemic Situation” that Zhang and Chen delivered at Tsinghua University on June 17, it was first proposed that in the case of an uncertain epidemic, it was necessary to appraise the transmission risks for countries and regions around the world. Based on the risk ratings or risk indexes, decisions to restart economies and reopen borders can be made with scientific evidence.

After careful analysis, we believe that the following risk indicators have more important warning significance and can be used to construct an infectious disease risk index:

Among them, the growth rate of new close contacts is not easy to obtain, because not all countries disclose the number of close contacts, and not every country can fully track close contacts. Therefore, our first version of the new crown epidemic risk index does not include this indicator for the time being, and other indicators are weighted and averaged according to the following weights:

Wk is the weight of each risk indicator, and its weighted sum is 100%.

Ik is the value of various risk indicators which can be regularized and standardized according to probability distribution to keep the total value of the index floating within 0-100.

Here is a list of countries and regions that reported more than 10,000 cases as of July 28. The higher the index number, the more the risk increases.

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