The next ten days

Looking to the numbers of Coronavirus epidemic so far, we can understand the serious concern pervading the scientific community and leading to the draconian containment measures taken in China, in Italy and soon in many other countries.

We tried to forecast the next ten days of the epidemic at global level, using the dataset from ECDC (link) which collects the daily positives and deaths coming from more than one hundred countries worldwide (starting from December 31, 2019 to March 9, 2020). For our estimates we used a Convolutional Neural Network model specialized in learning temporal sequences by minimizing the loss function on the second derivative for the cumulative time series. We focused our projections on the worldwide dynamics, but, as you may know, every country provides different statistics, measuring in slightly different ways the epidemic: at national level the contagion may appear quite different.

Below you can see our best projections (confidence interval 80%). The next ten days will be a critical turning point to decide the progression of Covid 19.

UPDATE 19/3/2020: Up to the present day ECDC officially reports 213.254 total cases of Covid-19 worldwide. Comparing the actual data to the previous forecast of ten days ago, we can (sadly) assert that the spreading of the new Coronavirus has entered a phase of exponential growth at global level.