Corona Daily 054: How will the Covid Pandemic End? When? Part Final

Today, I come to the most exciting part of the pandemic forecasting exercise – predicting the precise date when the pandemic ends. By ending I mean social ending, with no masks, no social distancing, crowded bazaars and trains, and traffic jams. There will still be a few cases and deaths, but they will not be front page news. Remember, 20,000 people died of respiratory diseases (flu and pneumonia) EVERY DAY in 2019. The official daily covid-19 figure has never surpassed that count.

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WHO says the pandemic won’t end unless 70% of the global population is vaccinated. Considering that 30% of global population (younger than 16) doesn’t yet have a vaccine developed for them, this is a gloomy forecast. WHO is probably thinking of eradicating the disease.

Dr Fauci predicts that 75-80% vaccination would allow America enough herd immunity to exit the pandemic before 2021 ends.

Renowned Indian astrologer Bejan Daruwalla projected the pandemic’s end in May 2021. But one year before verifying it, he died of suspected covid in May 2020.

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From my reading, I can recommend two sources that have done serious work on the subject.

One is an article by McKinsey & company dated 26 March 2021. Based on seven variables, the company predicts the pandemic will end in the UK and USA in the second quarter of this year, EU in the third quarter and the rest of the world in 2022.

The other source is an academic paper by a group of computer engineers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia. Their “covid-19 pandemic prediction study” is based on machine learning models. The model uses ARIMA and SARIMA, which are not the names of Egyptian queens, but acronyms. ARIMA is AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average. S in SARIMA is Seasonal.

For some odd reason, if you love reading papers with tables and formulas, you may want to read their two papers, one published in October 2020 and another in April 2021. Their projected pandemic end dates are November 2021 for USA, India, Europe, UK, and September 2021 for Brazil. Unfortunately, after their April paper, severe waves happened in India and Brazil. They made the predictions unrealistic, certainly for those two countries. The Saudi-Egyptian model ignores vaccination levels.  

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My method is a simplified one. I have assumed a bell curve (remember normal distribution?) where the virus after peaking, declines in a symmetrical fashion so that the peak is exactly in the centre of the bell curve. (Since all models can go wrong, simple is better than complex).

I give here the dates of peak cases and peak deaths for nine countries. The last column is the latest vaccination data until yesterday. First figure is the % receiving at least one shot, second % fully vaccinated. (If you are number-immune, you may jump to the next table.)

Source: Worldometer	Peak cases (date)	Peak deaths (date)	Vaccination % (one shot/fully)
World	902,022(23 Apr 21)	17,498(20 Jan 21)	Negligible
USA	305,067(8 Jan 21)	4,463 (12 Jan 21)	53/45
Brazil	98,135 (18 Jun 21)	4,211 (6 Apr 21)	30/11
India	414,433 (6 May 21)	4,930 (15 May 21)	16/3.6
Russia	29,935 (24 Dec 20)	635 (24 Dec 20)	14/11
UK	67,808 (8 Jan 21)	1,823 (20 Jan 21)	65/47
France	58,581 (6 Nov 20)	932 (13 Nov 20)	48/25
Germany	32,546 (14 Apr 21)	1,244 (29 Dec 20)	51/31
Poland	35,246 (1 Apr 21)	954 (8 Apr 21)	43/29

 

(Note: Brazil has reached another peak this week. We don’t yet know when Brazil will peak. Russia’s figures are not trustworthy. Both cases and deaths peaked in December, but the curve was suspiciously flat after that and is now growing. Russians don’t trust vaccines either. Only 14% have opted to take a shot despite plenty of supply. Germany is an anomaly in that the deaths peaked in December, but cases had another surge in April.)

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Taking the peaks from the table above as the mid-point between the first case and the pandemic ending, I get the following pandemic end-dates.

	First Case	Peak	End date
World	1 Dec 2019	23 April 2021	16 October 2022
USA	22 Jan 2020	8 Jan 2021	25 Dec 2021
Brazil	26 Feb 2020	18 June 2021	10 October 2022
India	30 Jan 2020	6 May 2021	12 August 2022
Russia	31 Jan 2020	24 Dec 2020	17 Nov 2021
UK	31 Jan 2020	8 Jan 2021	16 Dec 2021
France	24 Jan 2020	6 Nov 2020	19 Aug 2021
Germany	27 Jan 2020	14 April 2021	1 July 2022
Poland	4 March 2020	1 April 2021	28 April 2022

 

There you have the joyful dates: Christmas 2021 for the UK and USA. 12 August 2022 for India. I am more confident about dates for these three countries than others. There may be additional waves. As long as they don’t alter the peak; the end date should not change much. This assumes the weakening of the virus severity because of the ‘self-limiting’ nature, natural immunity and vaccination.

If your country is missing from the table here, find the date of the first case (Wikipedia), the peak (worldometer), and calculate the end date taking the peak as the mid-point. The result would be more scientific than an astrologer’s prediction.

Ravi