Coronavirus Curves Across Africa: Telling Trends from Data-Driven Models

Insights, inspiration and implications for charting a recovery roadmap

Timely containment action and targeted mass testing of critical hotspots and clusters, supported by spatial intelligence, are key to forestalling the danger of rapid explosion of COVID-19 cases within community transmission clusters.

Global simulation curve predicting a hopeful start in June 2020, but…

Starting April 5th, 2020, a new global equation governing the growth trend of COVID-19 cases has emerged, heralding hope in the horizon beginning June 2020. The new curve is showing a respite along its projected downward path, a departure from the exponential curves we have been treated to in the last two updates here. As shown in the graph, the emerging equation becomes:

Basic calculus, using April 5th as the origin, reveals that this quadratic curve reaches a climax at 3,728,604 cases by May 31st, 2020. After this point, the curve doesn’t rise further. The implication is that there is likely to be a flattening in the global numbers and hence a rapid reduction in active COVID-19 cases. This projection assumes that the cases in Africa, which as at April 16th still remained low, wouldn’t surge with more tests — especially the more comprehensive targeted mass testing which African countries like Kenya have reported to start embarking on.