COVID-19 Forecast Hub weekly report

Background

This report provides a brief summary of the weekly ensemble forecast from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub based on forecasts submitted on December 14, 2020. In collaboration with the US CDC, our team aggregates COVID-19 forecasts from dozens of teams around the globe. Typically on Wednesday or Thursday of each week, a summary of the week’s forecasts from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub appear on the official CDC COVID-19 forecasting page.

Every week, teams submit their forecasts to the COVID-19 Forecast Hub. This past week, 59 models were submitted.

Each Monday evening or Tuesday morning, we combine the most recent forecasts from each team into a single “ensemble” forecast of reported COVID-19 cases at the county, state, and national level and deaths at the state and national level. At the moment, we only generate ensemble forecasts for four weeks into the future, as we don’t have reliable evidence that the models are accurate past that horizon.

An archive of weekly reports from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub can be found at this page.

COVID-19 Mortality Forecasts

National level

This week, our ensemble combined forecasts from 46 different models.

At the national level, the ensemble model’s best guess is that we will see between 17,300 and 21,600 deaths each week for the next four weeks (Figure 1) with around 376,500 deaths by January 09 (95% prediction interval: 356,948 - 390,717).

For the week ending January 09, the ensemble forecasts that reported COVID-19 deaths in the US will be between 15,800 and 27,700 (95% prediction interval: 15,757 - 27,718).

You can explore the full set of models, including their forecasts for past weeks online at our interactive forecast visualization.

Figure 1: Weekly observed and forecasted COVID-19 deaths. Observed data from JHU CSSE and forecasts from the COVID-19 Forecast Hub.

State-by-state Breakdown

The ensemble model estimates that 40 states and territories of the US have a greater than 50% chance of having more deaths in the next two weeks compared to the past two weeks (Table 1).The model forecasts that 29 states and territories have a greater than 75% chance of an increase over the next two weeks (Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Virgin Islands, US).

The sortable and searchable table below shows the total number of reported COVID-19 deaths at the US level and by state over the last two weeks (ending Saturday, December 12, 2020) and the forecasted counts for the subsequent two weeks (ending December 26, 2020).

The sortable and searchable table below shows the total number of reported COVID-19 deaths at the US level and by state as of Saturday, December 12, 2020 (“Total COVID-19 Deaths”) as well as the rate of reported COVID-19 deaths in the population (standardized per 100,000 population) over the last two weeks and over the next two weeks. Looking at the rates allows for easier comparison across states, where you can see which states have had or are predicted to have propoportionally higher rates in comparison to other states. These tables calculate an average daily number of deaths per 100,000 population across the last two weeks (ending Saturday, December 12, 2020) and forecasted for the following two weeks (ending December 26, 2020).

This report was reproducibly and dynamically generated using RMarkdown. The code for the report can be found here.