Forecasting the Prevalence of COVID-19 in Maharashtra, Delhi, Kerala, and India using an ARIMA model

Abstract Aims: As the whole world was preparing to welcome the year 2020, a new deadly virus, COVID-19, was reported in the Wuhan city of China in late December 2019. By May 18, 2020, approximately 4.7 million cases and 0.32 million deaths had been reported globally. There is an urgent need to predict the COVID-19 prevalence to control the spread of the virus.Methods: Time-series analyses can help understand the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic and take appropriate measures to curb the spread of the disease. In this study, an ARIMA model was developed to predict the trend of COVID-19 prevalence in the states of Maharashtra, Delhi and Kerala, and India as a whole.Results: The prevalence of COVID-19 from 16 March 2020 to 17 May 2020 was collected from the website of Covid19india. Several ARIMA models were generated along with the performance measures. ARIMA (2,3,1), ARIMA (2,2,0), ARIMA (2,2,0), and ARIMA (1,3,1) with the lowest MAPE (5.430, 10.440, 2.607, and 2.390) for Maharashtra, Delhi, Kerala, and India were selected as the best fit models respectively. The findings show that over the next 20 days, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases may increase to 2.45 lakhs in India, 93,709 in Maharashtra, 19,847 in Delhi, and 925 in Kerala.Conclusion: The results of this study can throw light on the intensity of the epidemic in the future and will help the government administrations in Maharashtra, Delhi, and Kerala to formulate effective measures and policy interventions to curb the virus in the coming days.