Photo: asiaone
Here’s some good news! We are making good progress in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic in the nation, so much so that a Singaporean think tank has predicted that COVID-19 outbreak in our country will be fully contained by July this year.
The Data-Driven Innovation (DDI) Lab of Singapore University of Technology and Design predicts that the pandemic will be 97% contained in Malaysia by May 7. It further predicted that the figure will increase to 99% by May 20, with full containment by July 8.
DDI claimed that it used existing knowledge of historical pandemic process patterns and continuously accumulated data of the current pandemic to come up with a model-based and data-driven approach to objectively predict the end dates of the COVID-19 outbreaks for various countries.
As the pandemic life cycles vary by countries, each country will face different phases of life cycles at a specific point in time.
In order to come up with these predictions, DDI studied the underlying dynamics such as population growth, new technologies and infectious diseases while using established mathematical models, which includes a logistic model that describes a general life cycle phenomenon (such as population growth) and the SIR (susceptible-infected recovered) model that describes the spread of infectious diseases.
Based on its study, China, where the virus first originated, will be first to get rid of the virus on April 19 while Qatar will be the last country to get rid of COVID-19 on February 2, 2021.
Other countries included were Singapore (July 16, 2020), Thailand (June 11, 2020), Indonesia (August 29, 2020), Philippines (July 7, 2020), Vietnam (May 3, 2020), Australia (June 3, 2020), US (September 2, 2020), Spain (August 2, 2020), Italy (August 30, 2020) and Iran (October 24, 2020).
While this is just one study and there is no saying when the pandemic will be over, we are glad to know that Malaysia is making headway in fighting the deadly virus. Way to go, Malaysia!
By: Siti Farhana Sheikh Yahya
