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. 2020 Mar 9:8:51761-51769.
doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2979599. eCollection 2020.

Early Prediction of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in the Mainland China Based on Simple Mathematical Model

Linhao Zhong  1 , Lin Mu  2   3 , Jing Li  3   4 , Jiaying Wang  3   4 , Zhe Yin  3   4 , Darong Liu  3   4
Affiliations

Early Prediction of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Outbreak in the Mainland China Based on Simple Mathematical Model

Linhao Zhong et al. IEEE Access. .

Abstract

The 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak has been treated as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. This work made an early prediction of the 2019-nCoV outbreak in China based on a simple mathematical model and limited epidemiological data. Combing characteristics of the historical epidemic, we found part of the released data is unreasonable. Through ruling out the unreasonable data, the model predictions exhibit that the number of the cumulative 2019-nCoV cases may reach 76,000 to 230,000, with a peak of the unrecovered infectives (22,000-74,000) occurring in late February to early March. After that, the infected cases will rapidly monotonically decrease until early May to late June, when the 2019-nCoV outbreak will fade out. Strong anti-epidemic measures may reduce the cumulative infected cases by 40%-49%. The improvement of medical care can also lead to about one-half transmission decrease and effectively shorten the duration of the 2019-nCoV.

Keywords: Epidemic transmission; infection rate; mathematical model; novel coronavirus; prediction; removal rate.

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Figures

FIGURE 1.
FIGURE 1.
The comparison between SARS in 2003 (2003-SARS) and 2019-nCoV: (a) the number of the infectives (I(t)) of SARS during 10 April 2003 to 24 June 2003 (blue-circle line) and the 2019-nCoV during 11 Jan 2020 to 29 Jan 2020 (red-circle line), where the thick blue line is the prediction of the model Eq. (4) for the 2003-SARS; (b) the infection rates (formula image(t)) of SARS (blue circles) and 2019-nCoV (red circles), and the exponentially fitted line of the infection rate of the 2003-SARS (blue line).
FIGURE 2.
FIGURE 2.
The infection rate of the 2019-nCoV: (a) the infection rate (formula image(t)) of the 2019-nCoV (red circles) and the linearly fitted lines; (b) the same as (a) but for the exponentially fitted infection rate with the unrealistic fitting curves dashed.
FIGURE 3.
FIGURE 3.
The prediction of the infected cases of the 2019-nCoV under different infection rate functions ((formula image)) and removal rate (formula image): (a) the sensitivity of the number of the infectives (formula image to the fitted functions of (formula image) in Figs. 2 under moderate removal rate (formula image), where the unreasonable results are dashed. (b) the same as (a) but for sensitivities to exponential formula image functions (formula image) and formula image (formula image). (c) the same as (b) but for the cumulative number of infected cases. The red circles in each plot is the real data released by the Chinese Government since 11 Jan 2020.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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