Mathematical Modeling to Estimate the Reproductive Number and the Outbreak Size of COVID-19: The case of India and the World

Abstract Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a global pandemic with more than 218,000 deaths in 211 different countries around the world. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the virus responsible for this deadliest disease. This paper describes a mathematical model for India, a country with the second highest population in the world with an extremely high population density of about 464 people per km2. This disease has multiphasic actions and reaction mode and our model SEIAQIm is based on six compartmental groups in the form of susceptible, exposed, infectious, asymptomatic, quarantine, and recovered immune factions. Latin Hypercube Sampling Partial Rank Correlation Coefficient method was used for the data analysis and model fitting. According to our model, India would reach its basic reproduction number R0=0.97 on May 14, 2020 with a total number of 73,800 estimated cases. Further, this study also equates the world's situation using the same model system and predicts by May 7, 2020 with a total number of 3,772,000 estimated confirmed cases. Moreover, the current mathematical model highlights the importance of social distancing as an effective method of containing spread of COVID-19.