Modeling COVID-19: Forecasting and analyzing the dynamics of the outbreak in Hubei and Turkey

ibrahim Halil Aslan; Mahir Demir; Michael Morgan Wise; Suzanne Lenhart

In late 2019, the city of Wuhan in the province of Hubei, China experienced an outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 , the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This outbreak quickly spread to all states of China and across the globe, being declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. The authorities imposed a strict lock-down on the city of Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province on 23 January 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020b) . In the face of over sixty-seven thousand cases and over three thousand deaths, the authorities continued strict enforcement of these measures (Chinese physicians, 2020; Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by Johns Hopkins CSSE, 2020). Finally, on 23 March 2020, Hubei reached a significant milestone as the province's health commission reported no new cases for seven consecutive days (World Health Organization, 2020b; The New York Times, 2020) . Shortly thereafter, after over two months of severe restrictions on the movements of the Hubei population, the "2020 Hubei Lockdowns" were relaxed as the Hubei outbreak began to wane, inspiring hope that the global pandemic might be able to be controlled.