Real-time prediction for multi-wave COVID-19 outbreaks

Intervention measures have been implemented worldwide to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. The COVID-19 outbreak has occured in several waves of infection, so this paper is divided into three groups, namely those countries who have passed the pandemic period, those countries who are still experiencing a single-wave pandemic, and those countries who are experiencing a multi-wave pandemic. The purpose of this study is to develop a multi-wave Richards model with several changepoint detection methods so as to obtain more accurate prediction results, especially for the multi-wave case. We investigated epidemiological trends in different countries from January 2020 to October 2021 to determine the temporal changes during the epidemic with respect to the intervention strategy used. In this article, we adjust the daily cumulative epidemiological data for COVID-19 using the logistic growth model and the multi-wave Richards curve development model. The changepoint detection methods used include the interpolation method, the Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) method, and the Binary Segmentation (BS) method. The results of the analysis using 9 countries show that the Richards model development can be used to analyze multi-wave data using changepoint detection so that the initial data used for prediction on the last wave can be determined precisely. The changepoint used is the coincident changepoint generated by the PELT and BS methods. The interpolation method is only used to find out how many pandemic waves have occurred in given a country. Several waves have been identified and can better describe the data. Our results can find the peak of the pandemic and when it will end in each country, both for a single-wave pandemic and a multi-wave pandemic.