Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has become a public-health threat globally and exerting a devastating impact on patients, healthcare providers, healthcare systems, and the financial health of economics. Undoubtedly, both developed and developing nations are struggling to control the pandemic, the situation is not different in in the South Asian Region (SAR). Lack of social-distancing due to higher population, health-inequalities, lack of adequate health infrastructure, and unpreparedness of health-system is placing tremendous challenge to control COVID-19 in these countries. Accurate predictions and forecasting are required for the readiness of healthcare systems for future plan-of-action. The present study was undertaken to forecast the trends in outbreak of COVID-19 in South Asian countries (7 countries) based on the publicly available cases data, drawn from the https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-source-data. We used Double Exponential Smoothing Model to predict the trends in the total confirmed and death cases caused by COVID-19. Findings reveal the highest point-forecast of confirmed (2.54%) and death (1.77%) case rates in India. Similarly, lower confirmed (0.71%) in Nepal and death rate (1.54%) in Maldives across SAR. Keeping in view the limited healthcare resources in SAR, accurate forecasting and detection, stronger disease-surveillance, and avoidance of acute-care for infected-cases is vital.

Keywords: COVID-19; South Asian Region (SAR); Double Exponential Smoothing Model (DESM); Forecasting; Healthcare

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Citation

Citation: Ramesh Athe., et al. “Forecasting the Trends and Probable Impact of COVID-19 on South Asian Region Based on the Publicly Available Data". Acta Scientific Medical Sciences 4.9 (2020): 102-110.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Ramesh Athe., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.