Forecasting new daily confirmed cases infected by COVID-19 in Italy from April 9th to May 18th 2020

Jamshidi, B.; Talaei-Khoei, A.; Jamshidi Zargaran, S.; Rezaei, M.

We aim at forecasting the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy by using a two-part time series to model the daily relative increments. Our model is based on the data observed from 22 February to 8 April 2020 and its objective is forecasting 40 days from 9 April to 18 May 2020. All the calculations, simulations, and results in the present paper have been done in MatLab R2015b. The average curve and 80% upper and lower bounds are calculated based on 100 simulations of the fitted models. According to our model, it is expected that by May 18th, 2020, the relative increment (RI) falls to the interval of 0.31% to 1.24% (average equal to 0.78%). During the last three days of the studied period, the RI belonged to the interval 2.5% to 3%. Accordingly, It is expected that the new daily confirmed cases face a decreasing to around 1900 on average. Finally, our prediction establishes that the cumulative number of confirmed cases reaches 237635 (with 80% confidence interval equal to [226340 248417] by May 18th, 2020.