Estimating the daily trend in the size of the COVID-19 infected population in Wuhan

Qiushi Lin; Taojun Hu; Xiao-Hua Zhou

More than 500 cases have been detected outside China. Despite the considerable medical resources and personnel that have been dispensed to combat COVID-19 in Hubei province, hospital capacity continues to be overburdened. There continues to be a shortage of hospital beds needed to accommodate the rising number of COVID-19 patients. In response to this growing crisis, Wuhan plans to transform hotels, venues, training centers and college dorms into quarantine and treatment centers for COVID-19 patients. Further, 13 mobile cabin hospitals will be built to provide over 10,000 beds. [2] Therefore, a careful and precise understanding of the potential number of cases in Wuhan is crucial for the prevention and control of the COVID-19 outbreak. Wu et al. (2020) provided an estimate of the total number of cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan, using the number of cases exported from Wuhan to cities outside mainland China. [3] However, since the number of cases exported from Wuhan to cities outside mainland China is small, their estimate of the size of the epidemic in Wuhan may not be precise and has large variability. Using the number of cases exported from Wuhan to all cities, including cities in China, outside Hubei Province, . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. In this article, we propose a new statistical method to estimate daily number of cases in Wuhan under a similar dynamic equation model as the one in [3] . Unlike the one in [3] , our method can also handle the missing information on whether a case is exported from Wuhan.