Understanding the present status and forecasting of COVID?19 in Wuhan

Toshihisa Tomie

The epidemic of COVID-19 was analyzed. When the fitting was carried out on February 2 by assuming the decay constant of 18 days as was observed in JpnInf2019, a relatively good fitting curve was obtained. However, after February 6 th , fitting by a single Gaussian became difficult. Therefore, we divided the data into three regions; Wuhan, Hubei Province except Wuhan, and mainland China other than Hubei Province, and it was found that the peak days in the three regions were different. The decay constant revealed in the new analysis was about 8 days. Outside Wuhan, the number of new infections has already decreased to less than half of their peak value on February 11. It is expected that the number of new infections will be negligibly small by the end of February if the present trend does not change. In Wuhan, although the number of new infections reached its peak, the fluctuation of the new infections is large. It is necessary to understand the cause of the big fluctuation for forcasting the end of the epidemic.