ARIMA forecasting of COVID-19 incidence in Italy, Russia, and the USA
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The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a severe respiratory infection that officially occurred in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. In late February, the disease began to spread quickly across the world, causing serious health, social, and economic emergencies. This paper aims to forecast the incidence of the COVID-19 epidemic through the medium of an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model, applied to Italy, Russia, and the USA, in three different time windows. The forecasts show that: i) the Arima models are reliable enough when new daily cases begin to stabilize; and ii) Russia and the USA will require more time than Italy to drop COVID-19 cases near zero. This may suggest the importance of the application of lockdown measures, which have been relatively stricter in Italy. Therefore, even if the results should be interpreted with caution, ARIMA models seem to be a good tool that can help the health authorities to monitor the diffusion of the outbreak.
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