Forecasting the daily and cumulative number of cases for the COVID-19 pandemic in India

Khajanchi, Subhas; Sarkar, Kankan

The ongoing novel coronavirus epidemic has been announced a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020, and the Govt. of India has declared a nationwide lockdown from March 25, 2020, to prevent community transmission of COVID-19. Due to absence of specific antivirals or vaccine, mathematical modeling play an important role to better understand the disease dynamics and designing strategies to control rapidly spreading infectious diseases. In our study, we developed a new compartmental model that explains the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. We calibrated our proposed model with daily COVID-19 data for the four Indian provinces, namely Jharkhand, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, and Chandigarh. We study the qualitative properties of the model including feasible equilibria and their stability with respect to the basic reproduction number $\mathcal{R}_0$. The disease-free equilibrium becomes stable and the endemic equilibrium becomes unstable when the recovery rate of infected individuals increased but if the disease transmission rate remains higher then the endemic equilibrium always remain stable. For the estimated model parameters, $\mathcal{R}_0>1$ for all the four provinces, which suggests the significant outbreak of COVID-19. Short-time prediction shows the increasing trend of daily and cumulative cases of COVID-19 for the four provinces of India.