Verification of Peak Death dates by University of Washington

A peak date is when the epidemic growth is at the maximum and after that the disease starts to subside. Hence it is of interest to know if a country or state has peaked.

Scientists use a popular model called SIR to predict how epidemics such as Covid19 are spreading. The results of the prediction vary based on assumptions made to feed appropirate inputs to the model. Hence we found that there was a need to independently verify these predictions looking at the actual data recorded over time.

University of Washington through it’s website, has been publishing its predicted Covid19 peak death dates for select American and European Countries. The death curve is calculated on the daily reported deaths and it should lag the curve of infections reported by reason. We were curious to verify these dates and built a methodology to validate these predictions. We found that the average lag between the two curves is around 7 days. The choice of countries choosen for their study is disappointing and does not include many countries that have not yet peaked. We have discared some small countries which fall below our threshold to make the predictions more meaningful.

Results

Last Updated: May 8, 2020. We plan to update these results every few days. So please check back for any changes.

Here is a comparison of peak dates as per University of Washington and our study.

Country	University of Washington	Our study (deaths)	Our study (new infections)	Lag in death and infections (days)
Austria	Apr 08	Apr 10	Mar 28	13
Belgium	Apr 10	Apr 14	Apr 12	2
Czech Republic	Apr 14	Apr 11	Apr 02	9
Denmark	Apr 04	Apr 07	Apr 07	0
Estonia	Apr 02	Apr 06	Apr 04	2
Finland	Apr 21	Apr 24	Apr 09	15
France	Apr 05	Apr 09	Apr 02	7
Germany	Apr 16	Apr 18	Apr 03	15
Greece	Apr 03	Apr 05	Apr 02	3
Hungary	Apr 24	Apr 20	Apr 12	8
Italy	Mar 27	Mar 31	Mar 26	5
Luxembourg	Apr 11	Apr 11	Mar 28	14
Netherlands	Apr 07	Apr 07	Apr 12	-5
Norway	Apr 20	Apr 13	Mar 29	15
Portugal	Apr 03	Apr 14	Apr 04	10
Slovenia	Apr 07	Apr 10	Mar 30	11
Spain	Apr 01	Apr 03	Apr 01	2
Switzerland	Apr 04	Apr 07	Mar 30	8
United Kingdom	Apr 10	Apr 13	Apr 15	-2
United States	Apr 15	Apr 18	Apr 10	8
Canada	Apr 16	not yet peaked	not yet peaked	-
Croatia	Apr 19	not yet peaked	Mar 31	-

Logic

The logic for this article has been mentioned in our previous article.

Graphs

Following is the list of charts for the countries mentioned above. For each country, there are two timeseries charts that have been plotted. First is the percentile epidemic curve, i.e. percentile of frequency of new patients per day. Second denotes the first order derivative of the epidemic curve, i.e. the change in daily cases. It is useful for finding peaks, which are marked by the vertical lines in the charts. Red lines indicate death cases plotted against time and blue lines indicate number of new infections reported, plotted against time. Similarly, a red vertical line is a death peak and a blue vertical line is a peak in the number of new infections reported.

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