The tool is based on the techniques described in the paper "A bivariate prediction approach for adapting the health care system response to the spread of COVID-19" by Paolo Berta, Pietro Giorgio Lovaglio, Paolo Paruolo, Stefano Verzillo.
The spread of COVID-19 implied a large and fast increase of demand for intensive care services. To face this increase in demand, health care systems need to adapt their response by increasing hospital beds, intensive care unit (ICU) capacity and by (re-)deploying doctors and other personnel.
The CIF tool implements a forecast approach based on the Vector Error Correction model for the daily counts of hospitalized patients with symptoms and of patients in ICU, using publicly available data on the current COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, Switzerland and Spain.