Model predicts 100 X worse Coronavirus outbreak in the fall of 2020 – March 2020

Potential impact of seasonal forcing on a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

This article is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.
Does not appears in consider control/containment measures, thus it is a worst-case model

Pre-print site has comments and links to Tweets referring to the study

Based on modeling 1,000 populations

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VitaminDWiki

 Download the PDF (March 4) from VitaminDWiki
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COVID-19 becomes common within a decade
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A novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) first detected in Wuhan, China, has spread rapidly since December 2019, causing more than 80,000 confirmed infections and 2,700 fatalities (as of Feb 27, 2020). Imported cases and transmission clusters of various sizes have been reported globally suggesting a pandemic is likely. Here, we explore how seasonal variation in transmissibility could modulate a SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Data from routine diagnostics show a strong and consistent seasonal variation of the four endemic coronaviruses (229E, HKU1, NL63, OC43) and we parameterize our model for SARS-CoV-2 using these data. The model allows for many subpopulations of different size with variable parameters. Simulations of different scenarios show that plausible parameters result in a small peak in early 2020 in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere and a larger peak in winter 2020/2021. Variation in transmission and migration rates can result in substantial variation in prevalence between regions. While the uncertainty in parameters is large, the scenarios we explore show that transient reductions in the incidence rate might be due to a combination of seasonal variation and infection control efforts but do not necessarily mean the epidemic is contained. Seasonal forcing on SARS-CoV-2 should thus be taken into account in the further monitoring of the global transmission. The likely aggregated effect of seasonal variation, infection control measures and transmission rate variation is a prolonged pandemic wave with lower prevalence at any given time, thereby providing a window of opportunity for better preparation of health care systems.

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