Forecasting the spread and total size of confirmed and discharged cases of COVID-19 in Nigeria using an ARIMA model

Abstract

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has been considered a global threat spreading to Nigeria and posing major public health threats and concerns. This led to the introduction of internationally acceptable non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as lockdowns, social distancing, and mandatory use of face masks by the Nigerian government to curtail the disease. This study aims to develop an Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) model to predict COVID-19 cases vis Total Confirmed Cases (TCC) and Total Discharged Cases (TDC) in Nigeria based on the daily data obtained from the Nigeria Centre for Diseases Control (NCDC) from 27 ${}^{\text{th}}$ February 2020 to 6 ${}^{\text{th}}$ June 2020. The autocorrelation function (ACF), and partial autocorrelation function (PACF) were used to determine the constructed model. An ARIMA model was developed to predict the trend of TCC and TDC for the next 200 days. Forecasting was done using the constructed models. The finding shown that TCC increased to 50,225 with a CI between 29,425 to 100,450 and TDC to 20,186 with CI between 11,106 to 40,366 approximately. The result shows a significant increase in both TCC and TDC from COVID-19 which should guide the government roll out and management of the different NPI and policies to contain the virus.