Forecasting the Severity of COVID-19 Pandemic Amidst the Emerging SARS-CoV-2 Variants: Adoption of ARIMA Model

Abstract

Currently, the global report of COVID-19 cases is around 110 million, and more than 2.43 million related death cases as of February 18, 2021. Viruses continuously change through mutation; hence, different virus of SARS-CoV-2 has been reported globally. The United Kingdom (UK), South Africa, Brazil, and Nigeria are the countries from which these emerged variants have been notified and now spreading globally. Therefore, these countries have been selected as a research sample for the present study. The datasets analyzed in this study spanned from March 1, 2020, to January 31, 2021, and were obtained from the World Health Organization website. The study used the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model to forecast coronavirus incidence in the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and Nigeria. ARIMA models with minimum Akaike Information Criterion Correction (AICc) and statistically significant parameters were chosen as the best models in this research. Accordingly, for the new confirmed cases, ARIMA (3,1,14), ARIMA (0,1,11), ARIMA (1,0,10), and ARIMA (1,1,14) models were chosen for the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and Nigeria, respectively. Also, the model specification for the confirmed death cases was ARIMA (3,0,4), ARIMA (0,1,4), ARIMA (1,0,7), and ARIMA (Brown); models were selected for the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and Nigeria, respectively. The results of the ARIMA model forecasting showed that if the required measures are not taken by the respective governments and health practitioners in the days to come, the magnitude of the coronavirus pandemic is expected to increase in the study’s selected countries.

Socioeconomic and demographic characteristics influencing the hesitancy and refusal of COVID-19 vaccine in Ghana

“…5,6 In elaborating on the context, the WG asserted that reluctance was a behavioral phenomenon that was vaccine-specific and context-specific and is measured in the light of the available immunization services against an expectation of meeting a specific vaccine coverage goal. 7 Research conducted by Marti et al 8 indicated that while high hesitancy levels lead to lower demand for vaccines, low hesitation levels do not always lead to a higher demand for vaccines. The VH Determinants Matrix categorizes the factors influencing behavioral choices to take some vaccines, delay or reject them, or all vaccines into three categories: contextual, individual and group, and vaccination-specific issues.…”

“…5,6 In elaborating on the context, the WG asserted that reluctance was a behavioral phenomenon that was vaccine-specific and context-specific and is measured in the light of the available immunization services against an expectation of meeting a specific vaccine coverage goal. 7 Research conducted by Marti et al . 8 indicated that while high hesitancy levels lead to lower demand for vaccines, low hesitation levels do not always lead to a higher demand for vaccines.…”

“…Similarly, public skepticism or trust can be exacerbated by misinformation and politicization of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine approval, and deployment procedures. 7,15…”

Epidemiological characteristics, spatial clusters and monthly incidence prediction of hand, foot and mouth disease from 2017 to 2022 in Shanxi Province, China

“…At present, ARIMA model has been widely used to simulate and forecast the epidemic tendency of infectious diseases and has achieved satisfactory effects [ 26 , 44 ]. In this work, we established a multiplicative ARIMA model due to the seasonal variations and annual periodicity of HFMD in Shanxi.…”

Comparative Evaluation of the Multilayer Perceptron Approach with Conventional ARIMA in Modeling and Prediction of COVID-19 Daily Death Cases

“…Li et al [ 20 ] reported different ARIMA models for different countries to forecast coronavirus incidence, and their model was selected based on AIC criteria. Tan et al [ 21 ] developed the seasonal autoregressive moving average (SARIMA) model for the analysis of the trend of the third wave of COVID-19 in Malaysia.…”