Predication of Inflection Point and Outbreak Size of COVID-19 in New Epicentres
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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) had caused more that 8 million infections as of middle June 2020. Recently, Brazil has become a new epicentre of COVID-19, while India and African region are potential epicentres. This study aims to predict the inflection point and outbreak size of these new/potential epicentres at the early phase of the epidemics by borrowing information from more `mature' curves from other countries. We modeled the cumulative cases to the well-known sigmoid growth curves to describe the epidemic trends under the mixed-effect models and using the four-parameter logistic model after power transformations. African region is predicted to have the largest total outbreak size of 3.9 million cases (2.2 to 6 million), and the inflection will come around September 13, 2020. Brazil and India are predicted to have a similar final outbreak size of around 2.5 million cases (1.1 to 4.3 million), with the inflection points arriving June 23 and July 26, respectively. We conclude in Brazil, India, and African the epidemics of COVI19 have not yet passed the inflection points; these regions potentially can take over USA in terms of outbreak size
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