Forecasting COVID-19

The World Health Organization declared the coronavirus disease 2019 a pandemic on March 11th, pointing to the over 118,000 cases in over 110 countries and territories around the world at that time. At the time of writing this manuscript, the number of confirmed cases has been surging rapidly past the half-million mark, emphasizing the sustained risk of further global spread. Governments around the world are imposing various containment measures while the healthcare system is bracing itself for tsunamis of infected individuals that will seek treatment. It is therefore important to know what to expect in terms of the growth of the number of cases, and to understand what is needed to arrest the very worrying trends. To that effect, we here show forecasts obtained with a simple iteration method that needs only the daily values of confirmed cases as input. The method takes into account expected recoveries and deaths, and it determines maximally allowed daily growth rates that lead away from exponential increase toward stable and declining numbers. Forecasts show that daily growth rates should be kept at least below 5% if we wish to see plateaus any time soon—unfortunately far from reality in most countries to date. We provide an executable as well as the source code for a straightforward application of the method on data from other countries.