Abstract
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. Health planners are seeking ways to forecast the evolution of the pandemic. In this study, a mathematical model was proposed for Saudi Arabia, the country with the highest reported number of COVID-19 cases in the Arab world. The proposed model was adapted from the model used for the Middle East respiratory syndrome outbreak in South Korea. Using time-dependent parameters, the model incorporated the effects of both population-wide self-protective measures and government actions. Data before and after the government imposed control policies on 3 March 2020 were used to validate the model. Predictions for the disease's progression were provided together with the evaluation of the effectiveness of the mitigation measures implemented by the government and self-protective measures taken by the population. The model predicted that, if the government had continued to implement its strong control measures, then the scale of the pandemic would have decreased by 99% by the end of June 2020. Under the current relaxed policies, the model predicted that the scale of the pandemic will have decreased by 99% by 10 August 2020. The error between the model's predictions and actual data was less than 6.5%. Although the proposed model did not capture all of the effects of human behaviors and government actions, it was validated as a result of its time-dependent parameters. The model's accuracy indicates that it can be used by public health policymakers.
Highlights
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world
The uncontrolled model in this study was based on the work of Xia et al [22] on modelling the outbreak of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS)
The uncontrolled model used in this study used the same assumptions of the model on which it was based, but did not include the asymptomatic category because doing so would require the inclusion of more parameters and, most importantly, would introduce a high degree of uncertainty to the model’s predictions because the number of asymptomatic individuals and their transmission rate during the COVID-19 pandemic were unknown
Summary
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. A mathematical model was proposed for Saudi Arabia, the country with the highest reported number of COVID-19 cases in the Arab world. The government continued to impose more restrictions, culminating in bans on travel between cities, lockdowns, and school and workplace closures [3] These measures targeted different parts of the country according to the level of the severity of infection. These actions, coupled with aggressive testing and the provision of adequate health services, may have reduced the number of infections and, more importantly, may have kept the fatality rate around 1.5% from the first death due to COVID-19 on 24 March 2020 until 15 April 2020. This rate was lower than the fatality rate of 5.2% in Europe and 3.7% in North America during the same period [4]
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