From Forbes:
AI Predicts Coronavirus Could Infect 2.5 Billion And Kill 53 Million. Doctors Say That’s Not Credible, And Here’s Why
An AI-powered simulation run by a technology executive says that Coronavirus could infect as many as 2.5 billion people within 45 days and kill as many as 52.9 million of them. Fortunately, however, conditions of infection and detection are changing, which in turn changes incredibly important factors that the AI isn’t aware of.And that probably means we’re safer than we think.
Probably being the operative word.
A new Coronavirus tracker app, with data on infections, deaths, and survival John Koetsier
Rational or not, fear of Coronavirus has spread around the world.
Facebook friends in Nevada are buying gas masks. Surgical-quality masks are selling out in Vancouver, Canada, where many Chinese have recently immigrated. United and other airlines have canceled flights to China, and a cruise ship with thousands of passengers is quarantined off the coast of Italy after medical professionals discovered one infected passenger.
A new site that tracks Coronavirus infections globally says we are currently at 24,566 infected, 493 dead, and 916 recovered.
All this prompted James Ross, co-founder of fintech startup HedgeChatter, to build a model for estimating the total global reach of Coronavirus.
"I started with day over day growth,” he told me, using publicly available data released by China. “[I then] took that data and dumped it into an AI neural net using a RNN [recurrent neural network] model and ran the simulation ten million times. That output dictated the forecast for the following day. Once the following day’s output was published, I grabbed that data, added it to the training data, and re-ran ten million times.”
The results so far have successfully predicted the following day’s publicly-released numbers within 3%, Ross says.
The results were shocking. Horrific, even.
Coronavirus predictions via a neural net, assuming conditions don't change.
Note: doctors say conditions will change, and are changing. James Ross
From 50,000 infections and 1,000 deaths after a week to 208,000 infections and almost 4,400 deaths after two weeks, the numbers keep growing as each infected person infects others in turn.
In 30 days, the model says, two million could die. And in just 15 more days, the death toll skyrockets.....MORE
But there is good news.
The model doesn’t know every factor, which Ross knows.
And multiple doctors and medical professionals says the good news is that the conditions and data fed into the neural network are changing. As those conditions change, the results will change massively....
