ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 is an epidemic that causes respiratory infection. The forecasted data will help the policy makers to take precautionary measures and to control the epidemic spread. The two models were adopted for forecasting the daily newly registered cases of COVID-19 namely 'earlyR' epidemic model and ARIMA model. In earlyR epidemic model, the reported values of serial interval of COVID-19 with gamma distribution have been used to estimate the value of R0 and 'projections' package is used to obtain epidemic trajectories by fitting the existing COVID-19 India data, serial interval distribution, and obtained R0 value of respective states. The ARIMA model is developed by using the 'auto.arima' function to evaluate the values of (p, d, q) and 'forecast' package is used to predict the new infected cases. The methodology evaluation shows that ARIMA model gives the better accuracy compared to earlyR epidemic model.
ABSTRACT
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which causes severe respiratory illness, has become a pandemic. The World Health Organization has declared it a public health crisis of international concern. We developed a susceptible, exposed, infected, recovered (SEIR) model for COVID-19 to show the importance of estimating the reproduction number (R0). This work is focused on predicting the COVID-19 outbreak in its early stage in India based on an estimation of R0. The developed model will help policymakers to take active measures prior to the further spread of COVID-19. Data on daily newly infected cases in India from March 2, 2020 to April 2, 2020 were to estimate R0 using the earlyR package. The maximum-likelihood approach was used to analyze the distribution of R0 values, and the bootstrap strategy was applied for resampling to identify the most likely R0 value. We estimated the median value of R0 to be 1.471 (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.351 to 1.592) and predicted that the new case count may reach 39,382 (95% CI, 34,300 to 47,351) in 30 days.