A STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF THE COVID-19 OUTBREAK DATA

Abstract

The exponential model is a commonly used epidemic model for the analysis of initial outbreak data due to an infectious disease. But there have been questions about its validity in practice. This article examines this issue through statistical analysis on 22 countries' initial COVID-19 outbreak data provided by the World Health Organization. For each of 22 countries, a general regression analysis is conducted for the cumulative confirmed cases. Our regression function is a 3-5 piecewise fitted functions which are obtained via regression analysis