Forecasting the cumulative number of COVID-19 deaths in China: a Boltzmann function-based modeling study

Gao, Yuanyuan; Zhang, Zuqin; Yao, Wei; Ying, Qi; Long, Cheng; Fu, Xinmiao

An outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 is ongoing in China and has spread worldwide. 1, 2 As of March 19, 2020, there had been 80,967 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 3,248 deaths in China. The epicenter of the outbreak, Wuhan city and related regions in Hubei Province, has reported 67,800 confirmed cases and 3,132 deaths. Although the number of new confirmed cases has substantially decreased since February 13, 2020, and the outbreak appears to be approaching the late phase in China, grave concerns about the severity of the outbreak have arisen, especially how many patients will die overall. Here, we have estimated the potential total number of COVID-19 deaths by applying Boltzmann function-based regression analysis, an approach that we recently developed for estimating the potential total numbers of confirmed cases for both the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 outbreak and the 2003 SARS epidemic. 3