The beginning
Well it is not quite the beginning, lockdown started a week ago and the first case of COVID-19 was reported in South Africa just over a month ago. Nevertheless this is the start of my blog so in that sense it is a beginning.
I first heard about the corona-virus and indeed Wuhan city late in January while visiting my daughter in London. She is a writer for CNN and was working from home to keep me company. Her job entails keeping the CNN website updated with the story of the day. Well that day it was this virus that had begun to spread across mainland China from a city called Wuhan. The virus had caused a lockdown of 60 million people and was responsible for 170 deaths and 7000 recorded infections.
I have just gone onto the CNN website and see that there are now over 1 million infections and 53000 deaths worldwide. With roughly half the world's population living under some manner of lockdown, the virus has impacted on all of our lives.
It was just two weeks ago that I decided to learn more about the pandemic. I spent the week-end immersed in all things COVID-19 figuring out how to model the pandemic for my South African healthcare clients. I found the best resource on the pandemic on Twitter would you believe it. There are two experts, Nicholas Christakis and Marc Lipsitch, that are worth following if you want to know more about viruses, pandemics, immunity and how much trouble the United States is in. One of Christakis’ tweets referred to a fascinating study on the China infections https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221.full and I used this to build a multi-state model for country-level COVID-19 forecasts.
You can access the model at https://nmg-covid-19.sctechnology.co.za, and play around with the assumptions to get an idea of how they impact the pandemic in South Africa. I have committed to update the model each week, and decided to write this blog to accompany my modelling work.
3 April 2020
I first heard about the corona-virus and indeed Wuhan city late in January while visiting my daughter in London. She is a writer for CNN and was working from home to keep me company. Her job entails keeping the CNN website updated with the story of the day. Well that day it was this virus that had begun to spread across mainland China from a city called Wuhan. The virus had caused a lockdown of 60 million people and was responsible for 170 deaths and 7000 recorded infections.
I have just gone onto the CNN website and see that there are now over 1 million infections and 53000 deaths worldwide. With roughly half the world's population living under some manner of lockdown, the virus has impacted on all of our lives.
It was just two weeks ago that I decided to learn more about the pandemic. I spent the week-end immersed in all things COVID-19 figuring out how to model the pandemic for my South African healthcare clients. I found the best resource on the pandemic on Twitter would you believe it. There are two experts, Nicholas Christakis and Marc Lipsitch, that are worth following if you want to know more about viruses, pandemics, immunity and how much trouble the United States is in. One of Christakis’ tweets referred to a fascinating study on the China infections https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/13/science.abb3221.full and I used this to build a multi-state model for country-level COVID-19 forecasts.
You can access the model at https://nmg-covid-19.sctechnology.co.za, and play around with the assumptions to get an idea of how they impact the pandemic in South Africa. I have committed to update the model each week, and decided to write this blog to accompany my modelling work.
3 April 2020
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