FORECAST OF CORONA VIRUS DISEASE (COVID–19) IN ETHIOPIA BASED ON CONFIRMED CASES UP TO 14TH OCTOBER 2020

An Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average model is a set of statistical models for forecasting time series data. Briefly, Auto regression uses the dependent relationship between an observation and lagged observations; integrated uses of differencing of raw observations; and Moving Average uses the dependency between an observation and a residual error.

The ARIMA (2, 2, 2) forecasted the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19, based on the time between March 2020 and October 2020 at 95% confidence interval. The result of daily report peaked in April 2020 in the country and slightly decreased after April 2020, evidenced by the challenged responses that invested in controlling the pandemic in the country. The maximum, predicted new case per day was 672 and the minimum predicted was 386 cases per day till half of December 2020. Furthermore, the total number of predicted confirmed cases of COVID-19 might reach around 119, 015 until half December 2020.

In general, if the government of Ethiopia ceased controlling mechanisms of COVID-19, then the pandemic may relapse again and affects the country more. Hence, this study suggested that proactive stepladder implements control mechanisms. Thus, all the concerned organizations can develop policies based on the result of the study.