Forecasting confirmed and recovered COVID-19 cases and deaths in Egypt after the genetic mutation of the virus: ARIMA Box-Jenkins approach

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is spreading disease all over the world. It is a real test for all health authorities all over the world including Egypt. After the eruption of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-2002/2003) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-2012/2014) in the world, new public health crisis, called new coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The coronavirus epidemic has spread over the world, affecting practically every country. As a result, it's become critical to comprehend disease trends in order to limit the consequences. The aim of this study, use the suitable statistical prediction models to meaningful in forecasting and controlling this global pandemic threat, especially after the genetic mutation of the virus in 2021. For this purpose, the Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model based on the Box-Jenkins approach was used to predict the confirmed, recovered cases and deaths of COVID-19 in Egypt. The most recent data available to determine the best prediction models for daily cases and death in Egypt, and to forecast them up to April 2021. The COVID-19 confirmed, recovered, and death cases were collected on a daily basis from the official Ministry of Health. According to our results, ARIMA models with ideally selected variables are excellent tools for monitoring and predicting trends of COVID-19 cases in Egypt. The results indicated that the estimated ARIMA models have a high ability to predict the number of confirmed cases, recovered COVID-19 cases and death in Egypt. The four stages of Box-Jenkins approach are conducted to obtain an appropriate ARIMA model for the number of confirmed cases, recovered COVID-19 cases and death in Egypt. According to the goodness-of-fit measures, the best model is ARIMA (1, 1, 1) for confirmed cases, ARIMA (1, 0, 1) for recovered cases, and ARIMA (1, 0, 0) for death. Moreover, we used these models to forecast the number of confirmed cases, recovered COVID-19 cases and death for the next twenty days. The results will enable us to provide a suitable advice to help in taking decision in Egypt on how to avoid negative effects for this epidemic.