Forecasting the development of the COVID-19 epidemic by nowcasting: when did things start to get better?

Abstract

Background: Now the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic becomes a global phenomenon and its development concerns billions of peoples’ lives. The development of the COVID-19 epidemic in China could be used as a reference for the other countries’ control strategy.

Methods: We used a classical susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model to forecast the development of the COVID-19 epidemic in China by nowcasting. The linear regression analyses were employed to predict the COVID-19 epidemic’s inflexion point. Finally, we used a susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) model to simulate the development of the COVID-19 epidemic in China throughout 2020.

Results: Our nowcasts show that the COVID-19 transmission rate started to slow down on January 30. The linear regression analyses further show that the inflexion point of this epidemic would arrive between February 17 and 18. The final SEIR model simulation forecasted that the COVID-19 epidemic would probably infect about 82,000 people and last throughout 2020 in China. We also applied our method to USA’s and global COVID-19 data and the nowcasts show that the development of COVID-19 pandemic is not optimistic in the rest of 2020.

Conclusion: The COVID-19 epidemic’s scale in China is much smaller than the previous estimations. After implemented strict control and prevention measures, such as city lockdown, it took a week to slow down the COVID-19 transmission and about four weeks to really mitigate the COVID-19 prevalence in China.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

forecast / COVID-19 epidemic / development

References

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AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

LBS devised this study and did modeling. YHZ collected and primarily processed data. YHZ, ZGL, LC and QLS analyzed the data and produced the figures. YHZ and ZGL wrote the first draft of this manuscript. ZGL and LBS revised the manuscript. All authors approved the submission of this work.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 81500503 and 81870456). We are grateful for Professor Liangsheng Zhang of Zhejiang University for his valuable advices on this work. LBS especially thanks his friends on WeChat for their zealous comments on this model, since it was first posted on Wechat Moments.

COMPLIANCE WITH ETHICS GUIDELINES

The authors Yuehui Zhang, Lin Chen, Qili Shi, Zhongguang Luo and Libing Shen declare that they have no conflict of interests.

All procedures performed in studies were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted, and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2020 Higher Education Press