Mathematic modeling of COVID-19 in the United States

摘要

COVID-19, the worst pandemic in 100 years, has rapidly spread to the entire world in 2 months since its early report in January 2020. Based on the publicly available data sources, we developed a simple mathematic modeling approach to track the outbreaks of COVID-19 in the US and three selected states: New York, Michigan and California. The same approach is applicable to other regions or countries. We hope our work can stimulate more effort in understanding how an outbreak is developing and how big a scope it can be and in what kind of time framework. Such information is critical for outbreak control, resource utilization and re-opening of the normal daily life to citizens in the affected community.