Mathematical Modeling and a Month Ahead Forecast of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic: An Indian Scenario

Ganiny, S.; Nisar, O.

India, the second-most populous country in the world, has been lately witnessing a daily surge in the COVID-19 infected cases. India is currently among the worst-hit nations worldwide, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and ranks just behind Brazil and USA. In order to prevent the further worsening of the situation, predicting the future course of the pandemic is of utmost importance. In this paper, we model the past trajectory (March 01, 2020 - July 25, 2020) and make a month-long (July 26, 2020 - August 24, 2020) forecast of the future evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in India using an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. According to our forecasting results, India is likely to have 3,800,989 cumulative infected cases, 1,634,142 cumulative active cases, 2,110,697 cumulative recoveries and 56,150 cumulative deaths by August 24, 2020, if the current trend of the pandemic continues to prevail. The implications of these forecasts are that in the upcoming month the infection rate of COVID-19 in India is going to escalate, while as the rate of recovery and the case-fatality rate is likely to reduce. In order to avert these possible scenarios, the administration and health-care personnel need to formulate and implement robust control measures, while the general public needs to be more responsible and strictly adhere to the established and newly formulated guidelines to slow down the spread of the pandemic and prevent it from transforming into a catastrophe.