According to a new AI simulation, the Wuhan coronavirus could kill 52.9 million people within 45 days—and infect 2.5 billion overall.
The death toll of the disease thus far is believed to be 565, according to a website dedicated to tracking the outbreak. So how did the simulation reach those titanic totals?
James Ross, co-founder of the financial technology company HedgeChatter, built the AI model. He spoke to Forbes about his process.
“I started with day over day growth,” he said, as quoted by Forbes. “[I then] took that data and dumped it into an AI neural net using a recurrent neural network model and ran the simulation ten million times. That output dictated the forecast for the following day. Once the following day’s output was published, I grabbed that data, added it to the training data, and re-ran ten million times.”
If these numbers alarm you—and, well, they should—it’s important to note that the AI model is missing key data. And healthcare workers around the world are focused on the outbreak, which should theoretically help limit its ability to spread.
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Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.