Forecasting the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) epidemics using a simple (simplistic) model - update (Feb. 8, 2020)

Slav W Hermanowicz

We analyzed infection cases in mainland China as reported by the National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China (www.nhc.gov.cn/xcs/xxgzbd/gzbd_index.shtml). As of the time of writing the number of cases is shown in Table 1 . The data are also plotted in Figure 1 . The first column in Table 1 represents days from the beginning of the outbreak. There is a considerable controversy as to the exact date of the outbreak with most reports pointing to mid-December (Li et al., 2020; Wang, Horby, Hayden, & Gao, 2020) while one analysis suggest multiple sources of original infection (Nishiura et al., 2020) . Initially, the outbreak was not recognized and number of confirmed cases is not fully known (P. Wu et al., 2020) . Initially, (Figure 1 ), the number of cases increased exponentially. This feature was also clearly recognized in a previous report (Zhao et al., 2020b) . (1), (2), (3) -ends of Periods 1, 2, and 3. Data beyond Feb. 6 were not used in model fitting and predictions . CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license It is made available under a author/funder, who has granted medRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.