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. 2020 Aug 10:729:138817.
doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138817. Epub 2020 Apr 22.

Estimation of COVID-19 prevalence in Italy, Spain, and France

Zeynep Ceylan  1
Affiliations

Estimation of COVID-19 prevalence in Italy, Spain, and France

Zeynep Ceylan. Sci Total Environ. .

Abstract

At the end of December 2019, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) appeared in Wuhan city, China. As of April 15, 2020, >1.9 million COVID-19 cases were confirmed worldwide, including >120,000 deaths. There is an urgent need to monitor and predict COVID-19 prevalence to control this spread more effectively. Time series models are significant in predicting the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak and taking the necessary measures to respond to this crisis. In this study, Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models were developed to predict the epidemiological trend of COVID-19 prevalence of Italy, Spain, and France, the most affected countries of Europe. The prevalence data of COVID-19 from 21 February 2020 to 15 April 2020 were collected from the World Health Organization website. Several ARIMA models were formulated with different ARIMA parameters. ARIMA (0,2,1), ARIMA (1,2,0), and ARIMA (0,2,1) models with the lowest MAPE values (4.7520, 5.8486, and 5.6335) were selected as the best models for Italy, Spain, and France, respectively. This study shows that ARIMA models are suitable for predicting the prevalence of COVID-19 in the future. The results of the analysis can shed light on understanding the trends of the outbreak and give an idea of the epidemiological stage of these regions. Besides, the prediction of COVID-19 prevalence trends of Italy, Spain, and France can help take precautions and policy formulation for this epidemic in other countries.

Keywords: ARIMA; COVID-19; Forecasting; Infection disease; Pandemic; Time series.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Figures

Unlabelled Image
Graphical abstract
Fig. 1
Fig. 1
The prevalence and incidence of the COVID-19 in Italy, Spain, and France.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Estimated autocorrelations for (a) Italy, (b) Spain, and (c) France.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The estimated ACF and PACF graphs to predict the epidemiological trend of COVID-19 prevalence for (a) Italy, (b) Spain, and (c) France.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Time-series plots for the best ARIMA models.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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