Many studies and warnings by the world leaders everyday hint at more horrible days ahead in the fight against coronavirus, adding further anxiety and depression to the mankind. May be they want to make sure that people stick to the basics and avoid blunders.
But there are also some positive reports that can give hope to the already-depressed humanity.
A new predictor model devised at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) suggests that the worst has passed. The team at QUT, led by physician, mathematician and Future Fellow Dan Nicolau, has developed a model to predict the trajectory of the virus and its mortality, based on reliable, country-independent data.
The predictions, updated daily, are available at COVIDwave.org and look at the ratio of known infections to recoveries in each country. The team then compared this ratio with the number of reported daily deaths in each country.
This shows that the world is currently in the middle of a second global wave of COVID-19, likely to last for some weeks. Remarkably, the data pattern is the same for most countries, including Australia.
“Many other models to predict and alter the course of the virus have been developed, but most depend on numerous, untested assumptions, and their predictions vary wildly. Our model does not do that, relying instead on more reliable, empirical data,” said Professor Nicolau, whose findings have been published on Medrxiv preprints, with the paper currently under review at the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The ratio of known COVID-19 cases to recovered patients will always go to nearly 1:1 over time, because most patients recover. So, that tells us when the worst has passed—if more people are recovering than are getting sick, in other words when the blue curve is heading down in our illustration, things are looking up, at least for now.
