Coronavirus: Portugal in the exponential phase

The average time of case number duplication is now of 1,9 days, it’s been better and it’s been worse. The confirmed cases had a variation of 43% in comparison to Tuesday and the total number of suspicious cases had a variation of 25%. Original text by Andrea Cunha Freitas published on Público on Mar.19, 06:00 The research team at Universidade de Coimbra is one of many working on the covid-19 pandemic all over the world, and it has already reached some conclusions. Among other things, there’s been an analysis of the time it takes for the number of infected people to duplicate - in China that time was on average 3 to 4 days. At the moment, the average time of confirmed case duplication is 1,93 days. It’s been worse, (on Sunday it was 1,87), and it’s also been better, (on Monday it was 2,33 days). The bigger this number gets, the better.

Francisco Caramelo, a researcher at Universidade de Coimbra, has been working on covid-19 propagation data with a team that includes two other researchers from the same university - Bárbara Oliveiros and Nuno Ferreira. The researcher had already told Público that the data in Portugal “is new and its been disclosed in different ways, at different times”. The irregularity makes it even more difficult to make any forecast, he admitted. “The forecast methods may be very varied, and they may include prediction models based in compartiments and curve adjustment, computational simulation and artificial intelligence”, adds Nuno Ferreira, another member of this team that publishes data and graphics every day on an open access website.

“For now we’re still in the exponential phase, and we don’t exactly know when the inflection point will come. That’s where the curve of the total number of confirmed cases starts to drop at a slower pace”, observes Nuno Ferreira. But, aside from the line that shows the total number of confirmed cases, there’s a curve on the new cases that also matters. “The peak of new case curve corresponds to the inflection of the curve relating to the total number of confirmed cases. In Portugal we still haven’t reached that inflection point, and the number of new cases is still rising”, adds the researcher. At this stage, he concludes, it’s important to “reach the inflection point in a few days and quickly reduce the curve of new cases, and increase the curve of recovered cases”.