Time Series Models for Forecasting the Number of Cases of SARS-COV-2 Dominant Variants During the Epidemic Waves in Chile

ABSTRACT

COVID-19 and its variants have created a global pandemic. In Chile, as of February 28 2022, more than 3 million people have been infected and more than 42 thousand people have died. In this article, a comparative study of different mathematical models used to model and predict the number of daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Chile is carried out. This research considers the daily records of confirmed cases since the beginning of the pandemic and therefore, includes those infected by the different variants of the virus (Delta, Gamma and Omicron), these variants have dominated the evolution of daily infections in Chile, being the Omicron variant the one that has shown to have a higher rate of infection at national level. The objective of this study is to provide relevant information on the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile through time series models that have been validated in different investigations and to assess their validity with the appearance of the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. © 2022, Escuela Politecnica Nacional. All rights reserved.