Thanks to a data scientist on reddit, I learned how the covid-19 epidemic is trending.

While longer term modeling is very useful for public policy making, I wanted to have a feel of how this is going to unfold in next few days.

The reason is that the longer the extrapolation, the less confidant we can be about the precision of the prediction.

With an exponential growth I struggle with how many cases there will be tomorrow, let alone 4 weeks from now.

The other reason I wanted to do short term extrapolation is because I don’t want to believe the models blindly. While it is easy to fit a curve into data, the real test of a model is in its predictive power. The other way of looking at it is that if a model is not predicting the events correctly even in the short term, we can and should start working on refining it sooner.

One thing I have done differently is that I am not looking just at the last data point for extrapolation. The reason is that I felt that the last point could be an outlier sometimes. Not sure if this is the best thing to do.

With this in mind, I plan to update these charts on a daily basis, unless the models breakdown.

Please take a look and provide your feedback.





