State officials hope California's new 10 p.m. stay-at-home order will slow the spread of COVID-19, otherwise, another 10,000 San Diegans are projected to contract the virus in the next 10 days. That's according to a new county-by-county forecast from Facebook, which rolled out the prediction software last month. Facebook projects L.A. County will see the second-largest increase in cases in the country by November 30. San Diego County is projected to add the 15th most cases, reaching a total of 78,594 infections by Nov. 30. The two-week forecast was released before Governor Gavin Newsom announced enhanced restrictions.

It's crucial to predict the spread of COVID-19 during the pandemic when a poor estimate could lead to overcrowded hospitals or extra-strict lockdowns. Facebook is betting that AI could help. It just published a paper outlining an AI technique it will use to forecast the spread of COVID-19 in counties across the whole US. The system predicts infections 14 days ahead by accounting for both the nature of the disease and the social factors that influence its reach. Facebook factored in the new coronavirus' inherent traits, but also trained its AI on time-based county case data as well as public, anonymized data that helped it account for elements like mobility and social distancing. The company also crafted a "neural autoregressive model" meant to separate regional and disease-specific elements of those data sets.