The Covid-19 epidemic in the UK

In this note we present some stylised facts about the Covid-19 epidemic in the UK using daily time-series data published by Public Health England and the UK Department of Health and Social Care. We model the data on confirmed new cases using standard count-data models estimated at the country and national levels using a fixed rolling window to capture changes in the model parameters over time. We then use the most recent estimated models to carry out a simple real-time forecasting exercise aimed at predicting the date when the number of confirmed new cases will be approximately zero.