Analysis and Prediction of COVID-19 Outbreak by the Numerical Modelling 

Pandemic COVID-19 is a contagious disease affecting more than 200 countries, territories and regions. Recently, Iraq is one of the countries that has immensely suffered with this outbreak. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI) is also prone to the disease. Until now more than 23,000 confirmed cases have been recorded in the region. Since the onset of the COVID-19 in Wuhan, based on epidemiological modelling, researchers have used various models to predict the future of the epidemic and the time of peak, yielding a diverse number in different countries. This study aims to estimate the basic reproductive number ( R0 ) for COVID-19 in KRI, using the standard SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Removed) epidemic model. A system of nonlinear differential equations is formulated and solved numerically by the 4th order Runge-Kutta method. Reproductive numbers R0 have been estimated by this method of fitting the curves between the actual daily data and numerical solution by applying the least square method. For the analysis, data were taken for the duration of 165 days from 1st of March to 12th August in a population of 5.2 million. It has been concluded that R0 is fluctuating during the outbreak with an average of 1.33, predicting that infected cases will reach their maximum value of around 540,000 on 5th of November 2020. Then the spread of the disease will die out since the number of susceptible will decrease to about 3.2 million. While the number of removed individuals will reach approximately to 1.5 million.