1,000,000 cases of COVID-19 outside of China: The date predicted by a simple heuristic
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We forecast 1,000,000 COVID-19 cases outside of China by March 31st, 2020 based on a heuristic and WHO situation reports. We do not model the COVID-19 pandemic; we model only the number of cases. The proposed heuristic is based on a simple observation that the plot of the given data is well approximated by an exponential curve. The exponential curve is used for forecasting the growth of new cases. It has been tested for the last situation report of the last day. Its accuracy has been 1.29% for the last day added and predicted by the 57 previous WHO situation reports (the date 18 March 2020). Prediction, forecast, pandemic, COVID-19, coronavirus, exponential growth curve parameter, heuristic, epidemiology, extrapolation, abductive reasoning, WHO situation report.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.354 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it