Abstract
The coronavirus COVID-19 has recently started to spread rapidly in Malaysia. The number of total infected cases has increased to 3662 on 05 April 2020, leading to the country being placed under lockdown. As the main public concern is whether the current situation will continue for the next few months, this study aims to predict the epidemic peak using the Susceptible–Exposed–Infectious–Recovered (SEIR) model, with incorporation of the mortality cases. The infection rate was estimated using the Genetic Algorithm (GA), while the Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) model was used to provide short-time forecasting of the number of infected cases. The results show that the estimated infection rate is 0.228 ± 0.013, while the basic reproductive number is 2.28 ± 0.13. The epidemic peak of COVID-19 in Malaysia could be reached on 26 July 2020, with an uncertain period of 30 days (12 July–11 August). Possible interventions by the government to reduce the infection rate by 25% over two or three months would delay the epidemic peak by 30 and 46 days, respectively. The forecasting results using the ANFIS model show a low Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) of 0.041; a low Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 2.45%; and a high coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.9964. The results also show that an intervention has a great effect on delaying the epidemic peak and a longer intervention period would reduce the epidemic size at the peak. The study provides important information for public health providers and the government to control the COVID-19 epidemic.
Highlights
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease first reported in China [1]
As the main public concern in Malaysia is whether the COVID-19 spread will continue for the upcoming few months, we provide here information on predicting the epidemic peak using the SEIR
The results related to the epidemic peak show that (1) the epidemic peak could be reached in the period ranging from 12 July to 11 August 2020, and last until the period ranging from 22 November 2020 to 12 January 2021; (2) the identification rate, which ranges from 0.01 to
Summary
Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is an infectious disease first reported in China [1]. COVID-19 has been confirmed on 25 January 2020 in Malaysia and currently continues to spread fast in the country, which seriously jeopardizes the lives of elderly people as well as those of any age who experience a serious underlying medical condition [2]. It can be observed that the COVID-19 outbreak started to be a pandemic after 27 February, such that more than 98.77% of the total infected cases was reported after this date. This outbreak is mostly attributed to a special religious gathering of more than 15,000 persons between 27 February and 2 March at a local mosque, which was an infection.
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