Analysis and Forecasting of the COVID-19 Epidemic Curve

Abstract

Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as a supreme challenge for the whole world as well as India. As of now approximately 6.5 million people died in the world. However, the major setback to the world was in 2021 as a result of the second and third waves of COVID-19, which were caused by a different variation of COVID-19 than the first variant. The governments and health sectors were not aware of the subsequent possible waves due to the lack of data analysis competency and improper forecasting models. Hence finding an inflection point of this epidemic curve for COVID-19 infection and death is very imperative to understand different waves and variants instigating these waves. Similarly predicting the epidemic curve for the future is vital to make the government and the systems aware of the impending situation and make them prepare accordingly. Hence this work attempts to demonstrate conditions for finding inflection points and intervals which helps in finding the number of waves and the variants of COVID-19. Simultaneously the forecasting of the number of infections in forthcoming wave is also done using the auto-regressive integrated moving average model to identify the number of waves in India. The prediction of the two months data was compared with actual data for proper analysis.