Question

Relate the concepts of population ecology, including population distributions, growth curves, and species interactions to the recent coronavirus pandemic. In your answer, relate recent patterns of COVID-19 and predict future patterns based on reasoning from these concepts. Your answer should demonstrate your understanding of population ecology.

Answer 1

The growing rate of population of world is 1.05% per year, whch shows the downfall from the last year. The statistics suggest that increase in average of population would be 81 million per year. the current population of the world is 10 billion as of march 2020.

  

fig 1: Yearly population growth curve

The current pandemic of the corona virus has affected a total of 196 countries. Total active cases of this corona virus around the world is 417,042 which includes the 18,595 and 108,300 number of deaths and recovered globally as of march 2020. This corona virus pandemic started from the city wuhan in china. the city is famous for its slaughtering and eating of various animals. The virus is spread by person to person via air droplets in the surroundings from affected person. This class of corona virus is Covid-19 which shows totally new features from all the past corona viruses found like mers and sars.

Fig 2: linear curve showing total cases of corona virus globally

The estimation of future corona virus cases is done by using simple statistical distribution. The final forecast for the infection at global level is done by average of daily growth rates in a month. The graph is found using the assumptions about the growth rate for the next 30 days.

  

Fig 3:covid 19 estimated global growth

Fig 4: Forecast of global growth using rolling average daily growth rate

If we take 3 day rolling average rate of 8.1 % new cases daily, then we will have two million infection of corona virus. however it can be altered by making social distance and lockdown of affected countries then growth rate would be about an half of it. This will grant rolling average growth rate in between 21 to 30 days. The above scenerio will confirm 550 to 720K active cases globally. The above curve will only flattened by making social distance is effective.

The current morlitility rate has risen to 4.03%. The change in mortility rate depends upon the measuring methods and the number of individuals tested for the confirmed cases of covid -19. Moreover, if we assume the true mortility rate is lower and countries are under testing then it suggest that the active cases of covid-19 is much higher than the current stats.