The current COVID-19 wave will likely be mitigated in the second-line European countries

Samuel Soubeyrand; Melina Ribaud; Virgile Baudrot; Denis Allard; Denys Pommeret; Lionel Roques

Mortality data were obtained from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (https: //github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/; Dong et al., 2020) . JHU CSSE provides, in particular, daily mortality at the scale of countries or provinces, grounded on diverse data sources including the World Health Organization and national government health departments. We selected the 15 European countries having at least 200 registered deaths by April 14, 2020. The eight countries with the lowest death rate (cumulative number of deaths divided by population size) up to April 14 were chosen as countries whose mortality dynamics have to be forecast. The seven other countries as well as the province of Hubei in China were used to build predictors. Hubei was the first COVID-19 hotspot and its number of registered deaths has clearly reached a plateau, whereas the European countries are still in the increasing stage ( Figure 1 ; see also Suppl. Figure S1 where mortality is scaled by the population size).