Projecting the Spread of COVID19 for Germany

Jean Roch Donsimoni; Rene Glawion; Bodo Plachter; Klaus Waelde

When reporting began, the ascension of new cases seemed to follow an exponential curve, with the number of new cases constantly increasing, however in early February, this trend stopped. Indeed, another trend then took over following a more S-shaped pattern, i.e. that of a sigmoidal function. The total number of reported cases over time is shown in Figure 1 . The …gure shows a clear explosive trend at the start of the outbreak before slowing down and approaching what appears to be an asymptote around 70,000. Soon after China, South Korea, Japan, and many other countries all started seeing a rise in their number of con…rmed cases. However, these countries have had very di¤erent experiences 5 when it comes to infection outbreaks. Indeed, while South Korea has seen the number of con-…rmed cases rise to 9,241, Japan only has 1,307 con…rmed cases (or 14% that of South Korea). The question remains to know whether these countries are also experiencing a convergence to a stable number of (cumulative) con…rmed cases. Figure 2 shows the cumulative number of con…rmed cases in South Korea (left) and Japan (right).