https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/03/200331162303.htm > The first study, published March 31, 2020, was conducted by Constantinos Siettos from the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italy and colleagues. The authors used a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered-Dead (SIRD) model calibrated with the reported data between January 11 and February 10, 2020 and forecasted the evolution of the outbreak in the epicenter of the outbreak, Hubei, China up until February 29. With these parameters, they forecasted that at least 45,000 would be infected and 2,700 would die by February 29 -- in fact, in Hubei, around 67,000 are known to have become infected, while the death toll was around 2800 in this time period. > The authors also used the SIRD model to estimate COVID-19's R0 value, an estimate of contagiousness which reflects the average number of people who may catch an infection from one contagious person. Across various scenarios, their estimate of R0 based on the available data was around 2.5. Assuming a high degree of underreporting of mild cases of COVID-19 in their data, they estimated a mortality rate in the total population of around 0.15% for the virus. Furthermore, based on a scenario assuming an order of 20-fold scaling of the number of infected in the total population, their study predicted a decline of the outbreak at the end of February in Hubei. Indeed, during the last days the number of new infected cases has dropped significantly.