Joe Biden still two months away, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the country is likely to increase to 20 million by the end of January, nearly doubling the current level of 12 million cases, predicts a new study.The research, published in the journal Scientific reports, applied a mathematical model which had accurately forecasted the rate of COVID-19 growth over the summer of 2020."One of the key reasons for the increased accuracy of this model over other COVID-19 forecasts is that this model accounts for the fact that people live in interconnected social networks rather than interacting mostly with random groups of strangers," said study co-author Raphael Thomadsen from the Washington University in St.