Novel Coronavirus: Simple analysis and predictions
Disclaimer: I don’t have a formal education in health science or biology and I don’t understand in detail how human virus infections work, migrate or transmit between humans or animals. Thus, I don’t pretend to build a complex model to estimate the current 2019-nCov outbreak and future outcomes. My goal is to explain the current reported data available from official sources using simple statistical methods and to have some baseline to understand the current situation.
In the recent days I have been surprised by the disparity of the reports about the Novel Coronavirus (officially named 2019-nCov). While some sources claim it is no more dangerous than the common flu others claim the end of the world is near. Putting all speculation, rumors and opinions aside I started to compile data from official sources in order to visualize and put together a simple data analysis I can understand and share. While there are a lot of discussion if the source of the data can be more or less accurate, the truth is this is the only factual data we have for the current outbreak.
The Novel Coronavirus outbreak presumably originated in a wet market in the Chinese city of Wuhan sometime during December 2019 with animal to human transmission. The Chinese government officials took at least one month to start publicly reporting about the outbreak. Using the…
