CorCast: A Distributed Architecture for Bayesian Epidemic Nowcasting and its Application to District-Level SARS-CoV-2 Infection Numbers in Germany

Timely information on current infection numbers during an epidemic is of crucial importance for decision makers in politics, medicine, and businesses. As information about local infection risk can guide public policy as well as individual behavior, such as the wearing of personal protective equipment or voluntary social distancing, statistical models providing such insights should be transparent and reproducible as well as accurate. Fulfilling these requirements is drastically complicated by the large amounts of data generated during exponential growth of infection numbers, and by the complexity of common inference pipelines. Here, we present CorCast – a stable and scalable distributed architecture for the reproducible estimation of nowcasts suitable for pandemic scenarios – and its application to the inference of district-level SARS-CoV-2 infection numbers in Germany.