2019-nCOV Outbreak

Currently the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is affecting mainland China along with 27 other countries and territories. First identified in Wuhan after 41 patients contracted pneumonia without a clear cause. I grabbed data from the Wiki page on the 2019-20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak page. The data so far as of this blog post fits a quadratic model. Here I make (albeit nonsensical) predictions about the future of this outbreak. 

Here I have plotted data from January 16 2020 and the next four weeks which is the writing of this blog post. The data fits a simple ax^2 +bx + c quadratic. The red dots represent the actual data for the number infected in mainland China whereas the blue curves are the models. The hashed lines represent 10% errors from the model.

Here we can see how many would be infected at the end of 2020. The model predicts roughly 12 million infections. I've assumed nobody dies and that the rate of spread is consistent with current trends.

What if the virus was allowed to go unchallenged for a very long time. Well sometime in 2029 the entire population of China would be infected. I've once again assumed nobody dies from the virus and that the infection rate is constant from the first 4 weeks up until the next 10 years. To make the model slightly more accurate I have placed China's current and projected population as the red line. Even with this the model is going to be far from accurate, as this isn't Plague Inc where nobody cares about disease and doctors don't work.