ABSTRACT
At the beginning of 2020, it became obvious that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic will have a fairly significant scale and duration. There was an unmet need for the analysis and forecast of the development of events. The forecast was needed to make the managerial decisions in terms of knowledge on the dynamics of the pandemic, considering and analyzing the incoming official statistics about the pandemic, modeling and predicting the behavior of this statistics. Due to the objective and subjective factors, the available statistics is far from the unknown true data regarding the pandemic. Therefore, strictly speaking, it was necessary to model and predict not the dynamics of the pandemic, but the dynamics of the official (i.e. government) statistics on the pandemic. This paper proposes a new model, referred to as the new opportunities model, to monitor, analyze and forecast the government statistics on COVID-19 pandemic. A modeling approach is offered in this regard. The modeling approach is important as it answers simple questions on what awaits us in the near future, which is the current phase of the pandemic and when all this will be over. The new opportunities model is applied to three different countries in terms of area, economy and population, namely Russia, Romania and Moldova, plus the Campania region in Italy, and proves to be efficient over other similar models including the classical Susceptible-Infected (SI) model. © 2023, Publishing House of the Romanian Academy. All rights reserved.