Prediction of Epidemic Peak and Infected Cases for COVID-19 Disease in Malaysia, 2020

Abdallah Alsayed, Hayder Sadir, Raja Kamil and Hasan Sari
Additional contact information
Abdallah Alsayed: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Hayder Sadir: Department of Computer and Wireless Communication, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Raja Kamil: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Serdang 43400, Selangor, Malaysia
Hasan Sari: College of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Kajang 43000, Malaysia

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 11, 1-15

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 (R 2 ) 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.

Keywords: COVID-19; SEIR model; epidemic peak; infection rate; basic reproductive number; ANFIS; GA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/11/4076/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/11/4076/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:11:p:4076-:d:368558

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().